Blue Galaxy

by Diane Dooley

Overview

Falling in love is easy; staying alive long enough to enjoy it just might be impossible.

Javan Rhodes, the hard-drinking, disreputable captain of space freighter The Kypris, took a mission to save himself from hitting the bottom of the food chain. Transporting Sola, a beautiful young aristocrat, from Earth to an unknown destination on the outer rim of the colonies is lucrative, but also highly illegal.

As tough as it is to evade both the law and the lawless, the hardest part of the job is not falling in love with his irresistible cargo. Just as he decides that he will never be able to hand her over to the warlord she must marry, he discovers that Sola has been playing a very dangerous game—one that could not only cost them their lives, but could also affect the balance of power in an increasingly dangerous universe.

22,000 words

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426891588
Publisher:	Harlequin
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	102
File size:	791 KB

About the Author

Diane Dooley was born in the Channel Islands, grew up in Scotland, has lived in several of the United States, loves to travel and to this day still suffers from wanderlust.

Since Diane was a voracious reader from a young age, it seemed to make perfect sense when she decided writing might make an enjoyable hobby. She has since realized that 'enjoyable' is entirely the wrong word. Her short stories have been published in several online venues, and she is a regular contributor to the science fiction blog The Galaxy Express.

Diane currently lives in a money pit of an old farmhouse in upstate New York, where she tends her husband, sons and a collection of reptiles. When she is not at her day job, she is either reading, writing, gardening, avoiding housework or driving her children to various sporting events. She is also a geek of intergalactic proportions with a severe YouTube habit.

Read an Excerpt

Captain Javan Rhodes sat on an empty packing crate while rusty dockbots loaded case after case of Cypriot brandy, water and nutripacks into the hold of the space freighter Kypris. It was going to be a long journey.

The Piraeus Spaceport was throbbing with the usual space trash and earth scum, while outside the electric fence the surviving people of Athens worried about their next meal. Javan smiled, perfectly at ease as he sipped from a flask of brandy. He would soon leave the hunger and the dusty stench of Piraeus behind in his trusty old ship, which had just undergone the most thorough repair and tune-up of its thirty years of service. Things were looking up. He'd even managed to have top-of-the-line firepower installed.

Finally. After all those desperate years of transporting cheap goods to the outer reaches, Javan had gotten the break he'd always hoped would come. The biggest payload of his career, no questions asked, discretion assured, and he was on his way to pulling his life back together. He would be able to afford a future—for the first time in a long time.

He took another bottle of brandy from a crate and filled his flask. Best not to think of how much trouble he could get into if this job went wrong. He was being paid a ridiculous sum to transport an unnamed passenger to an unnamed destination—half the credits up front, the rest on delivery. He was probably committing the most illegal act of his career. And he didn't give a damn. He needed this—or he might as well go for a long, fatal swim in the Aegean. Death by drowning would be preferable to the ever-present threat of slow starvation on Earth.

Javan sipped slowly while an unfamiliar human dockworker approached. He tucked the flask into his pocket and casually palmed his flick knife. He took off his leather flight jacket and waited.

"Captain Rhodes?"

He nodded.

"Olympia says hi." The man pulled out a knife. "Olympia says bye."

Javan lunged, forcing his blade deep into the man's throat. The knife dropped, and the man slumped to the ground, where he gurgled and writhed before dying. After a quick look around, Javan dragged the corpse to the empty packing crate and shoved it inside before replacing the lid. His would-be assassin had been slow, stupid and malnourished. Olympia was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

With his ship in good repair and some credits in his pocket, he dared to dream of taking care of Olympia once and for all. She'd put a price on his head long ago, and she was never going to give up on her revenge. Javan sighed as he rinsed the blood off his hands at a nearby spigot. If not for this job, it would have been wise for him to let the assassin succeed.