In a universe where humans are not the dominant species, the first human space marshal investigates a crime involving the kidnapping of his kind and discovers terrifying revelations.
Excerpt
Hamus
The familiar feeling of ice trailing through new veins charged the fresh brain of Hamus. His upper body and arms radiated with a chilling sensation, then it continued down until it reached the three stubs at the end of both rounded feet.
Eleven. Eleven times in two hundred and ninety-seven years. Eleven times Hamus had gone through rejuvenation. His consciousness had been transferred to eleven different bodies. All of them were tough battle-skinned drid bodies. They were shells, really. And they could obviously use an improvement. Why else would he have needed to change eleven damn times?
He let his eyelids rise and immediately regretted it. The sharp red eyes and narrow mohawk head of Captain Kruz stood above him.
“What in hell’s planet happened?” she asked.
“It was a trap,” Hamus managed to say, still groggy from the rejuvenation. “They were expecting us. The explosives were already in place.”
“Did you see anyone?” Kruz’s top lip froze in its usual snarl.
“Only their ship flying away. Swift-19 freighter. We got a tracer on it.”
Kruz raised an eye. “How in Iotis did you do that?”
“The human is going after it.”
Hamus didn’t know how he expected Kruz to respond to the news. Hell, he didn’t know how he would respond if the roles were reversed. But he was quite surprised at the strained skin wrinkles that stretched across her reddish gray face.
“How the phrod did three of my marshals get almost blown to shits and an overgrown human survive?”
“Four,” Hamus corrected.
“What?”
“Four of us were almost blown to shits.” Hamus pulled himself up on the steel platform and took a deep breath through his new lungs. They certainly worked better than his previous breathing faculties. His breath was long and filled with unpolluted oxygen. It still couldn’t temper the fumes Hamus could feel emanating from his superior.
“I ordered him to stay out of our way and fly in behind us.” Hamus could sense his request for a promotion deleting itself from Central Command’s mainframe. “He must have been far enough away from the blast to survive. He pulled me out of the rubble and we both saw the freighter flying away. We traced it and I had him go after it.”
Kruz sat in silence for a couple breaths, then her features slowly loosened, and her skin changed back to its natural dull gray. “You better find your marshal soon, Hamus. The human is in far over his red-blooded head.”
She stalked away, leaving Hamus alone in the rejuvenation room. This was the setting Hamus was used to. At least, this was how he awoke the last ten times.
