SpaceBook Awakens (Amy Armstrong 3) Read online

  SpaceBook Awakens

  by

  Stephen Colegrove

  Book Three of the Amy Armstrong Series

  Copyright Information

  SPACEBOOK AWAKENS

  Copyright 2016 Stephen Colegrove

  First Edition: October 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Holder. Requests for permission should be directed to Stephen Colegrove via e-mail at [email protected].

  Cover design by Lilac

  Find out more about the author and upcoming books at the links below:

  stevecolegrove.com

  amishspaceman.com

  Facebook

  @stevecolegrove

  Also by the author:

  The Girl Who Stole A Planet

  Empire of the Space Cats

  The Amish Spaceman

  The Roman Spaceman

  A Girl Called Badger

  The Dream Widow

  Table of Contents

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  A Note From The Author

  Cast of Characters

  Amy Armstrong: A fourteen-year-old thief from 1995 California. Accidentally flung two thousand years into the future, she is trying to find a way back to her own time

  Philip Marlborough: A seventeen-year-old boy from late nineteenth-century England also trapped in the future

  The Lady: An ancient human cyborg and corporate head of a business that specializes in trans-dimensional theft, who gives Amy Armstrong a ship. Revealed at the end of Book One to be a dimensional twin of Amy Armstrong.

  Sunflower: An orange shorthair tabby who worked for the Lady and accidentally brought Amy Armstrong into the future. His wife disappeared while on a similar mission. Bone strengthening and other cybernetic implants have changed his body from that of a normal cat.

  Betsy Jackson: A male Jack Russell terrier who formerly worked for the Lady. Dim-witted and easily distracted. Bone strengthening and other cybernetic implants have changed his body from that of a normal dog.

  Nick: A female sprite who formerly worked for the Lady in the gem-sorting department. Sprites are a bio-engineered species of five-inch-tall humanoids with transparent wings that allow them to fly.

  Nistra: A former officer of the sauropod prison system. Ordered to help Amy Armstrong find a way back to Earth, but secretly plots to steal her ship, since his home world powers the ship’s drive. Sauropods are a bio-engineered species of seven-foot-tall bipedal lizards, similar to a fat crocodile walking on its hind legs

  George, Plastra, Astra: Sauropods who have secretly hidden themselves in the cargo hold of Amy’s ship.

  Kepler Prime: Nistra’s homeworld, secretly miniaturized by the Lady and installed as the power source for Amy’s ship

  Alligators are legendary throughout the galaxy as the dumbest creatures to ever fog a mirror, and that includes teenage pop stars of any species. With more teeth than brain cells, the myopic monsters thrashed freely through the swimming pools and sewer systems of an ancient land called Flory-Duh, swallowing anything and everything in sight. A cursory attention to politics and current events would have alerted these scaly morons to imminent war among the humans, who were also blasting experimental ships full of cats and dogs to the stars––the inheritors of true civilization and your ancestors. However, instead of picketing the launch sites of the colony ships or creating a political action committee to elect alligator-friendly representatives to Congress, the swampy reptiles continued to burst through toilet bowls and chomp away at anything that moved, guaranteeing extinction as the mushroom clouds and radiation destroyed all life.

  Centuries later, one particular megalomaniac was not content with the absence of such an illiterate, boneheaded species from the galactic gene pool. A circus owner and former bioscience researcher, Doctor Furrykins, mounted an expedition to Earth, returning from the dead world with the DNA of what he claimed were ‘alligator,’ but which many suspect were cell samples from a mutant lizard slash radio deejay called Alan living in a nice two-bedroom condo on the outskirts of a radioactive Miami. Intending to clone the species and add them to his many carnivals traveling around the planet Gliese, the cat scientist Dr. Furrykins made a decimal point error in his calculations. Infused with too much human DNA, the giant reptiles developed brains ten times larger than normal, and could even drive a stick. This became useful when a band of the monsters escaped from Furrykin’s lab in an off-road vehicle, taking fertilized eggs and a recipe for quick cloning. A guerrilla war with the local cat police quickly turned global, culminating in the War of Ten Armies. Although the artificial creations––now called “sauropods”––lost the war, enough of the beasts escaped to Kepler Prime and quickly covered that planet.

  In summation, the next time you meet a sauro in the street, don’t kick them in the shins and run away. Just point and laugh at the idiots, because they used to live in the sewer.

  —Excerpt from Wank & Fugnalls Galactic History, Four-Hundred Seventeenth Edition

  War is hell, and you’ll see that real quick if you surprise a platoon of sauropods without armor or air support to back you up. The bastards wear metal sheathing on top of their already-thick hide, and run and jump like grasshoppers on a hot stove. With all that weight they still carry automatic rifles that would break the back of any cat just picking it up, and I’ve served with some of the best cats in the Empire. Some say it’s the reptile rage they go into; others say it’s because they’re as dumb as two rocks in a bag. I say, nuke ‘em from orbit.

  —Major Mittens Wallace, 6/7 Third Cat Infantry, Remembering the Gliese Conflict

  The government of Tau Ceti has many reasons for sending Class-A convicted criminals to the orbital prison on Kepler Prime. First of all, no one has ever escaped. Imagine yourself locked in a room with a horde of scaly monstrosities pacing outside. That cell is no longer a cell––it’s a safe house! Other reasons … sometimes they eat the prisoners. Not for enjoyment, mind––it cuts down on cost.

  —Sooka Black, Preceptor of the Glorious Imperial Homeworld of Tau Ceti

  Chapter One

  Amy paced the navigation room, her fingers rubbing the burnt edges of a hole in her blouse right over her heart. If not for the six-inch rip in the silky material and the pink circle on her skin, it would have been impossible to tell from her appearance––slightly mussed, long blonde hair, long-sleeved white blouse, black leather vest, pleated skirt in tartan blue, dark navy tights, and leather Mary Janes––that she had just come from a battle between murderous tentacled robots and a regiment of furiously leaping armored cat tanks.

  Philip had changed into the embarrassingly tight uniform required by the ship. Apart from the black skullcap, the crimson color of the stretchy spandex material matched the shade of th
e teenager’s face when he was first ordered to wear it. The dark-haired boy leaned over a low black cylinder in the center of the room and stared at a mess of text and numbers scrolling across the flat upper surface. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the room that surrounded the pair of teens were in reality featureless and gray, but the ship projected a panoramic view of the exterior into the minds of the two humans, making it seem as if they and the control console were flying through the night sky with nothing but clouds around them. Below their feet, the moon shone on the Pacific Ocean, the dark coast of Monterey Bay, and a grid of houses with only a sprinkling of yellow lights.

  Amy shuffled to a stop next to Philip. “I should be dead,” she murmured.

  Philip looked up from the data scrolling across the table and hugged her tight. “Still fretting over that, darling? I rather think we should be concerned with how and why we’ve come to be in the wrong California.”

  Amy shrugged. “Oh, I know how that happened––I dropped a screwdriver in the transmat drive.” She pulled together the edges of the wide hole in her blouse and stared up at the stars in the sky. “Blanche, should I be dead?”

  “Despite her attempts to the contrary, my Lady is experiencing nominal health for a fourteen-year-old human female,” said the motherly voice of the ship, “Blood pressure, pulse, and glucose levels are within range, although reproductive hormones are––”

  “Stop! All I want to know is, did I survive because of my blouse?”

  “Most likely, my Lady. I have been informed that several thousand nanites in the affected cloth perished while absorbing a high-energy particle beam.”

  Amy glanced down. “Wow. I feel bad now.”

  “My Lady would not be feeling anything if the nanites had not sacrificed themselves and the surrounding material. My Lady would be dead.”

  Philip smiled faintly. “Perhaps we should hold a memorial service.”

  “The honorary services have long since ended,” said the ship. “The offspring of the heroic nanites are preparing to attend nanite college on scholarships established for this purpose. The span of life and temporal awareness on a microscopic scale are much faster than a human’s.”

  Philip leaned forward and touched the cloth of Amy’s blouse. “Allow me to ponder this for a moment, my dear. You’re walking around with an extremely small university in your garments?”

  Amy held up her hands. “I don’t want to know. I’m very grateful that the nanites saved me, but I really don’t want to think about tiny bugs living in my skirts.”

  “Nanites are neither bugs nor insects, my Lady,” said the ship. “They are nano-elemental organisms on the hadron scale.”

  “I don’t care!”

  Philip raised a finger. “Let’s focus on the current situation. I would like to point out that flying a large silver spacecraft in full view of everyone who lives along the seaside is not the wisest of actions, even at night.”

  “Are you afraid they’ll shoot at us? Nobody ever looks up. This is before UFOs and little green men.”

  “Yew-eff-oh? Is that Spanish?”

  “Unidentified Flying Object. Blanche, is there any way to find out the year? I don’t want to land and get eaten by the natives.”

  Philip pointed down at a dark line that followed the coast north and south. “They have a railroad, so I doubt we’ll find any cannibals.”

  “From the decay of the nearest SpaceBook signal, the approximate year is between 1910 and 1920 C.E.,” said the motherly voice of the ship. “By analyzing Earth’s distance from Sol, I would estimate early April of the Gregorian calendar.”

  “Good gravy,” whispered Amy. “That’s a long shot from 1995.”

  “In vastness of space and time, it is quite close,” said the ship. “The accuracy of transdimensional travel is lessened when my overrides are disabled and a tool is dropped into the elemental array.”

  “Sorry! I said I was sorry.”

  “No need for apologies, my Lady. I am merely stating fact.”

  “In my opinion we should move this ship to a more discreet location,” said Philip. “At least until this MacGuffin character can calibrate the transmat drive. He said that it wouldn’t take long.”

  Amy sighed. “Right, sorry. I’ve been focused on myself. Blanche, take us further south. We can land in the mountains and not bother anyone.”

  “Or not have anyone bother us,” said Philip.

  A bright circle appeared in the night sky and an orange tabby cat and a brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier jumped into the navigation room. A six-inch-tall blonde woman flew through the opening after them, her transparent dragonfly wings buzzing loudly. The two animals wore the ship’s tight red uniform, their fur sticking out from the leg and neck openings, and the tiny woman wore a short red dress of the same stretchy fabric.

  “Are we there yet?” barked Betsy, the terrier.

  “That is the dumbest and most predictable thing you could have said,” growled Sunflower. “You wouldn’t know where ‘there’ was if ‘there’ came up and hit you with a steel pipe!”

  Betsy blinked at the cat. “Hey! You just did that, Sunnie. Thanks for knocking my implant back into place.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The tiny blonde woman landed on Amy’s shoulder.

  “I’m bored! We’ve been stuck in this ship, like, forever. Can’t we go shopping like you promised?”

  Amy watched the dark line of the coast fly beneath her feet as the ship moved inland. “I don’t know, Nick. We’re in the right place, but the wrong time.”

  Sunflower’s green eyes grew wide. “What? I thought that idiot Macwhatshisname fixed everything.”

  Amy nodded. “He did, but this idiot—me—dropped a screwdriver on the transmat drive.”

  “Fantastic. You know, blowing up your entire civilization was the best thing humans did for the galaxy.”

  “What about Alpha Centauri?” asked Betsy, tail wagging. “Lots of humans there.”

  “Have you seen them play football? They might as well be dead, the way those zombies stagger around the pitch.”

  Betsy giggled. “That’s right! Humans can’t play at all. They’re funny.”

  Amy ran her fingers through her hair and walked through the holographic night sky to the hatch.

  “This conversation has been so interesting that I hate to walk away,” she said. “But I need to take a bath.”

  “My Lady, your garments are self-cleaning,” said the ship.

  “Well, I’m an old-fashioned girl who likes to take a bath the old-fashioned way.”

  “I don’t think there are any buckets on the ship,” said Philip.

  Amy turned and spread her arms. “Not THAT old-fashioned!”

  ASTRA SET two poona next to the wall of the container. One had brown fur with white patches, and the other was gray. He pointed a sharp claw at the hamster-like rodents and turned to the group of giant lizards behind him.

  “Five hundred mao to the winner. The one that makes it to the corner.”

  A huge brown sauro shook his head. “Why are you telling them? Poona can’t talk.

  “I’m not talking to them, George! I’m talking to you!”

  “Oh, okay. That’s fine.”

  Astra slapped the metal deck behind the poona, and the small mammals shot along the wall on their four tiny legs. Astra and the half-dozen sauro watching the race screamed and hooted, perhaps in a belief that the already panic-stricken rodents would become even more panic-stricken.

  The brown-and-white contestant reached the far wall first, and a few of the sauros groaned, including Astra. George tromped in his big-clawed feet to the corner, snatched up the gray poona, and tossed the squirming rodent into his jaws like a circus peanut.

  “You egg-brain!” yelled Astra. “Why?”

  George shrugged and swallowed. “He lost.”

  “Now we’ve only got one. You can’t race one poona against himself!”

  George blinked at Astra. “Sorry. Wa
nt me to eat the other one?”

  “No. Go and sit in the corner.”

  Plastra and three other giant lizards sat in a circle around a small shipping crate, each holding five cards in front of his scaly snout. On top of the crate lay a pile of cards.

  “Stop making so much noise, you two!” yelled Plastra, staring at the cards in his hand. “I’m finally winning.”

  His yellow eyes opened wide as the air condensed into a straw-colored gel, trapping everything in the shipping container like a fly in amber. A sweet odor mixed with carbon entered the narrow nostrils of the sauro, smelling like a box of sweet rolls covered in flame, and warmth spread over his scaly hide. The heat changed suddenly to a searing cold, and everything disappeared in a blinding flash.

  Plastra blinked. The amber, the smells, and the cold were gone, and the inside of the container was the same as before. He growled and stamped his foot.

  “George!”

  “I didn’t do it, I swear!”

  “Probably just the engines slowing down,” said Astra. “It means we’ll stop soon.”

  George rubbed his clawed hands. “That means killing! Can we start killing now?”

  Astra clapped a scaly green hand on George’s shoulder. “When Nistra gets us out of this stupid box. Don’t worry––it will be soon.”

  An evil, sharp-toothed grin spread across George’s long snout, like an alligator who’d just eaten a very tasty cat.

  “Good,” he whispered.

  AMY WASHED her hair with something she hoped was shampoo and stood for a long time in the tiny shower-closet, her forehead pressed against the wall and a stream of something she hoped was hot water pouring down her neck and back. It could have been baby oil for all she cared. The only important thing was that it was hot.