Found Girl Read online

  Found Girl

  Project Enterprise 6

  Pauline Baird Jones

  Contents

  About Found Girl

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part IV

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Also by Pauline Baird Jones

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About Found Girl

  She’s an alien farm girl. He’s a hotshot soldier. Can their love save an alien sanctuary from destruction?

  * * *

  Arian Teraz refuses to waste her life on a loveless arranged marriage and a rocky plot of farmland. So when a mysterious ship lands in front of her and invites her to take a chance on something else, she doesn’t hesitate. Fleeing her planet, hostile forces open fire on her ship, and she has no choice but to send the ship through a wormhole. Clinging to life, she rockets out the other side… and plummets into the strong arms of a handsome soldier.

  * * *

  After months of staring into empty space, Captain Jackson “Coop” Cooper is itching for some action. He gets it when a wormhole delivers an alien ship into their path. He volunteers to make first contact, rescuing the ship with its injured alien beauty and her unusual shipmate. Before they can get acquainted, new threats send them on a wild ride through the cosmos and into a mysterious sanctuary with no means of escape. With little time to sort out enemies and allies, Arian and Coop must work together to uncover the secret behind her hidden destiny if they stand any chance of surviving their future.

  * * *

  Found Girl is the sixth standalone book in the spectacular Project Enterprise sci-fi romance series. If you like cosmic battles, human-alien love stories, and imaginative future worlds, then you’ll love Pauline Baird Jones’ high-adrenaline adventure.

  * * *

  Buy Found Girl to beam into a sexy interstellar romance today!

  * * *

  I’d like to dedicate this book to my parents

  who taught me everything I know

  about never giving up.

  * * *

  Ann Gwynn Baird 1932-2016

  Robert Nebel Baird 1927-2016

  * * *

  I miss you.

  Part I

  1

  If desire alone could carry her from this place, she would be gone already. So it was not a surprise when she opened her eyes and found her two feet still planted on the ground.

  Fickle, elusive hope. Like the stars, it beckoned and tantalized and ultimately left her stuck still.

  She gave a soft laugh that morphed into a sigh. She should not have come, even though it was the last night, the last time she could look up and hope.

  She had known tomorrow would come, had known it since she had been old enough to know much of anything. Everyone got older. Everyone reached their age of majority. Knowing all this should have stamped out hope. Tomorrow there would be a formal day of ceremony to mark her coming of age, and at the conclusion, pact bonding with a man picked for her by the Government.

  The end of privacy. The end of hope.

  A shiver ran down her back as she considered the men who had visited the farm. Most had looked at the land, but one—one had looked at her as if he knew what she hid. Her mind and her flesh had shrunk from him, though he had kept the legal distance the whole time. If the Government chose him—she shuddered at the thought. Would even her thoughts be private from those eyes?

  She had thought—she had hoped—her desire to escape would somehow be enough to open a path to freedom. She gave a silent, hollow laugh. As if willpower alone could free her from the laws of science that she was not supposed to know. Well, if sheer stubborn will could not set her free, then she must direct that stubbornness into finding a way to kill hope this night.

  No space ship was going to drop out of the sky and scoop her up—

  Her thoughts skidded to a halt as one of the bright distant stars did seem to be dropping out of the sky. She stared. Took a step toward it, then another. With each step, it seemed to come closer, grow brighter.

  “It is not, it can not be for me,” she murmured. She was just a farm laborer. A small cog in a large, indifferent wheel.

  It continued to approach—it had to be a ship, not a star because its brightness dimmed as if its pilot knew it was using forbidden air space. It was something conjured from her hope, she told herself, but the hum of it felt real. It vibrated through the soles of her work boots, increasing in intensity until it rushed past her, almost knocking her off her feet as its backwash hit. She staggered from the force of it, then spun to keep it in view.

  She thought she saw a black bowl-shape drop below the tree line. She tensed for impact, but none came.

  She did not consciously decide to follow. Her feet moved, slow at first, then fast, and faster still, as hope broke free from restraints, propelling her through the darkest shadows. It did not matter that she could not see in the nearly moonless dark. She knew every rise, every dip, every plant and tree of this trap she’d been born to.

  By the time she reached the fallow field where the ship hovered—silent and dark a few feet above the ground—she gasped for breath. She was a farmer, not a runner. Bent, her hands resting on her knees, she studied the quiescent object, barely visible in the mix of shadow and faint starlight.

  It was a starship. She knew this though she’d never seen any of the ships that carried the food produced on Bosakli to the other planets in the Consortium.

  Her breathing still rapid, she jumped off the canal bank and moved closer, keeping to the shadows thrown down by the trees that separated this field from the others. It was unlikely anyone else was out this late, but she had not survived this long by being careless.

  She stopped where what light there was began. Be careful what you wish for, her grandmother had told her many times. Was it here for someone else? As the thought formed, her mind, her heart rejected it.

  It had come for her.

  It felt as if all she had hoped for, all she had longed for throughout the long dreary years, had coalesced into this single moment of utter certainty. This ship was hers.

  She felt no fear, no relief. Just a sense of something finally feeling right for the first time in her life. With her shoulders back, she stalked up to the ship as a ramp lowered to meet her. Something stirred in the depths, a soft clicking, then two eyes, yellow circles surrounding dark orbs, appeared out of the black depths.

  Its height and position made her suspect it was not humanoid—which the Consortium claimed was not possible, but she had never believed them anyway.

  For a moment she hesitated, but one did not reject a gift, just because it might contain a two-edged sword. Or nonhuman aliens. She jumped up on the ramp. Her boots thumped as she walked forward, and she heard a soft click of claws against metal as the eyes retreated, then the whir as the hatch closed her
in…

  2

  Now that they’d boldly gone somewhere, Colonel Jackson “Coop” Cooper would have liked to do more than talk about how cool it was to boldly be somewhere.

  The Boyington’s geeks claimed they had passed the boundary into a new star system during ship night. He’d have to take their word for it. Looking at the projected view outside? All he could see was a whole lot of deep space on one side and even more deep space on the other.

  He loosed a silent sigh. Probably not much chance of finding another hidden base full of advanced technology and weapons, no matter how far they got from the Milky Way. In his experience, the universe didn’t repeat the good stuff. In the absence of a hidden base, he would settle for first contact with some actual aliens.

  Where was the adventure they’d promised him as a consolation for the trip to Mars he hadn’t got? Okay, so the secret expedition wouldn’t be secret if they went to Mars where the Project Enterprise ships could have been spotted by who knew who—though no one had explained how they’d managed to get out of their system. And they wouldn’t. He was a fighter jockey, the commander of the Boyington’s air group, which meant he got orders, not explanations.

  He leaned back in his chair and tried not to yawn as the head geek blah blah blahed about the results of their initial, deep system scan. Sure, he was ecstatic it had so much cool astrophysical crap and a big healthy sun. Who didn’t like finding another sun? He needed to work on his tan. Or here’s a thought. Turn him and his flyboys loose to go look at all of it. Flying sim-drills was not making any of them happy.

  He glanced at Pappy, sitting across from him. Not General Boyette’s real name, but the nickname came with the command of the Boyington. Pappy, hiding a yawn with a hand and a cough, met Coop’s gaze and gave a slight shrug. Must be galling to him that they’d missed the battle in the Garradian Galaxy, then been sent here before things hotted up again. On the upside, the Boyington had been upgraded with a lot of the cool tech post battle, enabling it to go further than any of the other expedition ships.

  Pappy’s eyes narrowed. “Is it just our point of entry that makes it look like we came in on the empty side of the system?”

  It did kind of look like they’d arrived in the system’s boonies.

  There was a concerted turn of geeks’ heads as they studied their arrival point, then the cluster of planets huddled on the other side of the system. What appeared to be streams of debris fanned out, as if drawn toward the cluster.

  “And what is all this?” Pappy’s finger pointed to the debris fields.

  “Asteroid belts?” one geek postulated.

  “Not belts,” another disagreed. “Not seeing any with a center of gravity.”

  There was a stir of excitement as someone zoomed in on the region.

  “Some of the clusters do appear to have gravitational orientation,” someone murmured.

  Coop tipped his head to one side. Kind of reminded him of a pool table. Wasn’t sure why that thought made him uneasy, other than the fact the Boyington seemed to be on the cue side of the table. He glanced at Pappy and found him frowning.

  “Might be a good idea to do a risk assessment—”

  Coop stiffened a half a second before the alarm cut off Pappy’s words. He was up and headed for the hatch opening as the alert began its klaxon call ship-wide. It was, so his pilots claimed, his super power, this uncanny ability to sense trouble coming even before the sensors.

  “Clear,” he ordered, flattening civilians and other personal against the wall as he jogged past, headed for the squadron’s hangar bay. Over his comm, the updates started to come in from Ops.

  Unknown contacts.

  Collision warnings began to blare as the space around them filled with multiple objects.

  Unknown risk factors.

  Other than the chance of getting slammed by multiple objects? “What do you know,” he snapped into his comm. Lots of explanations, but nothing with meat.

  By the time he’d donned his speed jeans and was settling into the cockpit of his Dauntless, Ops was reporting that at least one of the objects was a ship. One possible life sign on board. Low energy signature. Possibly an indication of damage, or it was a dead/dying ship. Or it was just had a low energy profile.

  Amazing how fast things could go from “wow, this is so cool that we’re in a new star system,” to “wow, there’s a bunch of UFO’s and an alien ship and I think I just wet my pants.” The civilians all looked wide-eyed, the military personnel, well, this was why they were here. If you were gonna go where no one had gone before, it was good to have guys and gals with guns around to respond first.

  He fired his engines, hovered into point position at the open bay doors, and waited for the go command. When it came, he punched it, the force of it slamming him against the back of his seat as his ship passed through the protective energy shield. His squadron followed him out in tight formation. Once they’d cleared the ship, they spread out, assuming an attack profile.

  What had been almost empty deep space now looked like someone had tossed a bunch of rocks into their path. Big ones. Little ones. The stream of rocks was denser at one end, thinner where his sensors picked up the ship. According to the data coming in, the objects at the front of the mass were moving faster than those at the rear, but all were oriented in one general direction. Like dice tossed on a table.

  He adjusted course and speed to match their bogey and began a cautious approach.

  “Keep back and cover me,” he ordered. If the universe was flinging rocks, he didn’t want his whole squadron to get caught in it. At least all the bogeys were following pretty much the same course, if not the same speed. He threaded a careful path through the thinnest section of rocks he could find, closing on the ship.

  According to the original sensor data, there’d been a bright flash of something, then the rocks and ship were just there. Geeks were still studying the readings from that. No indications of a familiar power source coming from the ship.

  Unlike the lumpy rocks of various sizes and shapes, the bogey was a classic oval that widened out to a rectangular snubbed wedge on its back end. The single life sign reading was based on Garradian technology that might not identify all alien life forms. Truth was, they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

  Yet.

  So far bogey and rocks were behaving predictably enough for him to ease in closer, though he jigged as much as he dared on approach. No reason to make himself an easy target if there were hostiles on board. He kicked on his spotlight, light stabbed out, and there it was. A for-real alien ship among the rocks. Almost as black as the deep space around it, it spun or tumbled—he wasn’t sure which—as he eased closer to take some further readings.

  “Sure you want to get that close, Banshee?” his wingman, Tiger, asked.

  Coop ignored the question, keyed his radio, “Home plate, you say you’re picking up life signs from this thing?” Looked dead dark to him.

  “Affirmative, first base, at least one possible life sign.”

  Which wasn’t exactly an affirmative.

  Well, he’d wished for this, and now he’d got it.

  First contact with something.

  He throttled back, matching speed with the bogey and activated his camera, then ran his light along it from stem to stern, recording the scan for the geeks to study, taking it slow—was that damage? Had it taken fire? Looked like it to him, but what did he know about what crap looked like out here? Some of the damage could be from impacts, but he could see something that could be scorch marks.

  His light brightened, and it almost seemed like a feedback running back along it. He tensed, but nothing happened, and no warnings appeared on his screens. Had he imagined it? He ran a quick diagnostic and got an ‘all systems fine’ notice. Wishful thinking, maybe? No, his gut was twitching. Something was looking back at him. D’oh. There was that possible life sign in there.

  Seemed like it was taking a long time for the geeks to get back to him. He ke
yed his radio. “What do you want me to do, home plate?”

  His radio crackled. “Banshee,” it was Pappy’s voice, “our people have identified what appears to be a port. Do you think you could tow the bogey safely back to home plate?”

  Coop hesitated. “You want me to tow this thing?” It wasn’t just all the rocks. Just because the ship hadn’t acted up, didn’t mean it wouldn’t.

  “We’d like you to try. If you get into trouble, cut it loose.”

  Pappy’s ship, Pappy’s call. “Affirmative.”

  “You’re not to risk your ship. That’s an order, Banshee.” Another pause. “They’re sending you the location of the port.” A pause. “Tow it to the aft bay.”

  Coop gave a silent whistle. Aft was the off-limits, super secret bay where it was rumored all the super secret alien stuff from the super secret Garradian base was stored. “Roger that, home plate.”

  He studied the image they sent, then did another traverse—there it was. It was gonna be tricky. It had rocks tracking along with it at varying distances, some a little too close for comfort. How had it ended up in the middle of that mess? He looked for a larger gap, did a silent countdown and slipped into the rock stream. Some of his sensors didn’t like it and complained. He ignored them and activated his cable, sending it slowly toward the port. Of course, the bogey would have to accept the connection for this to work—it clicked into place, flashing green, an indication it was a solid connection. Okay then. Life sign confirmed? Maybe. Could be an automated response.