Apex Predator: the Outlawed Colonies #3 Read online

  Table of Contents

  APEX | PREDATOR | THE OUTLAWED COLONIES 3

  GAIL'S OTHER BOOKS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  HUNTING VARMITS

  SUSPICIONS

  THE FAR HORIZON

  EAST OF THE MOON

  EYES IN THE SKY

  THE LOTUS FIELD

  EYE SPY

  MONSOON!

  URSUS MAGNUM

  WEST OF THE SUN

  BLOODY WATER

  MOON DANCER

  I'LL HUFF AND I'LL PUFF

  I'LL BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN

  BEHOLD: A NEW WORLD!

  WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

  FINALE

  LAUGHING MOUNTAIN - THE PORTAL YEARS

  ONCE UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR

  EARTH: GATEWAY TO OTHER WORLDS

  ST. ANTONI -THE FORBIDDEN COLONy

  THE OUTLAWED COLONIES:

  LEMURIA

  A NEW SERIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE FROM GAIL

  BONUS: EXCERPT FROM THE CLONE INITIATIVE

  DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?

  THIS HEART OF MINE

  Sign up for Gail Daley's Mailing List

  Further Reading: The Portal Lawman

  APEX

  PREDATOR

  THE OUTLAWED COLONIES 3

  GAIL DALEY

  GAIL'S OTHER BOOKS

  SPACE COLONY JOURNALS

  Options of Survival

  Destiny Rising

  Tomorrows Legacy

  The Interstellar Jewel Heist

  The Designer People

  Alien Trails

  Quantum Light

  Soturi—A Novella*

  PORTAL WORLD TALES

  Rulari – Land of Myth & Magic

  Federation Colonies & Civilizations

  The Outlaw Colonies

  ST. ANTONI – THE FORBIDDEN COLONY

  Warriors of St. Antoni

  The Enforcers

  The Gaslight Bandits

  The Portal Lawman

  Cradle of Fire

  The Clone Initiative

  THE OUTLAWED COLONIES

  Game Theory

  Heirs of Avalon

  Apex Predator

  Babylon Shattered*

  Cloned Ambition*

  MAGI OF RULARI

  Spell of The Magi

  Magi Storm

  Paladin

  NON-FICTION

  The Complete Modern Artist’s Handbook

  PAMPHLETS

  Introduction to The Internet #1

  The Hard Stuff – Handbook #2

  Art Show Basics – Handbook #3

  Framing on a Budget – Handbook #4

  Are You Making Money? – Handbook #5

  For Writers Only – Handbook #6*

  *Working Title. Release dates TBA

  COPYRIGHT

  APEX PREDATOR Copyright © 2021 by Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  E-BOOK ISBN: 978-1-68564-017-0

  PB ISBN- 978-1-68564-018-7

  HB ISBN 978-1-68489-198-6

  ASIN:

  For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions Coordinator," at the address below.

  Gail Daley

  5688 E Sussex Way

  Fresno, CA 93727

  www.gaildaley.com

  Ordering Information: Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the "Bulk Sales Department" at the address above.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is unintentional and accidental.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Book The Apex Predator Gail Daley—1st ed. Copyright © 2021 by Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

  Cover Art Copyright © 2021 by Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  The first world discovered by the Laughing Mountain Scientists was a doozy. A fitting match for Homo Sapiens—the deadliest predator of all time—maybe.

  If the native animals here don't get you, the plants just might.

  Life is hard on the outlaw colony of Lemuria. Some days it's a struggle to stay alive. The plants and animals are huge and deadly. Homo Sapiens are apex predators, but they may have met their match on this planet.

  Zach Tylor is young, tough, and broke. He needs the money, so despite his better judgement, he agrees to guide a group of researchers to a mysterious structure the colonists called the Halivaara Wheel. During the trip, he uncovers a dangerous conspiracy that threatens not only his home planet, but all the Outlawed Colonies.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  GAIL'S OTHER BOOKS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  HUNTING VARMITS

  SUSPICIONS

  THE FAR HORIZON

  EAST OF THE MOON

  EYES IN THE SKY

  THE LOTUS FIELD

  EYE SPY

  MONSOON!

  URSUS MAGNUM

  WEST OF THE SUN

  BLOODY WATER

  MOON DANCER

  I'LL HUFF AND I'LL PUFF

  I'LL BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN

  BEHOLD: A NEW WORLD!

  WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

  FINALE

  LAUGHING MOUNTAIN - THE PORTAL YEARS

  ONCE UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR

  EARTH: GATEWAY TO OTHER WORLDS

  ST. ANTONI -THE FORBIDDEN COLONy

  THE OUTLAWED COLONIES:

  LEMURIA

  ANIMALS

  PLANTS

  A NEW SERIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE FROM GAIL

  BONUS: EXCERPT FROM THE CLONE INITIATIVE

  DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?

  THIS HEART OF MINE

  HUNTING VARMITS

  A WHUFFLING snort in his ear woke Zach Tylor from a sound sleep. He turned his head to find a pig-like snout about an inch from his nose. The snout belonged to Lucy, his semi-guard pet. The scientific name for Lucy's species was Lupinus Leo. Colonists referred to them as Banded Koodoo. Zach just called her Lucy. Lucy’s DNA said she had both feline and canine characteristics; she had the retractable claws and night vision of a cat and the devotion and loyalty of a dog. She stood eighteen inches high at the shoulders and weighed about sixty pounds, with coarse, oily, red fur, broken by horizontal yellow stripes along her back and tail. She had short, pricked ears and large dark eyes. Spines made of the same substance as her claws ran up and down her spine as a predator defense. Her tail, wide at the base, narrowed to a barbed ball at the end.

  She was regarding him with the alert attention that told him she wanted a human to fix what was wrong. The ambient light in the room told Zach it was about an hour before dawn. It was too early for his brood of Sun Risers, the large fluffy birds he kept for their meat, eggs, and feathers, to be awake unless something was bothering them. Since he didn’t hear the restless clucking signali
ng they were alarmed, he decided whatever had prompted Lucy to wake him wasn’t bothering the Sun Risers.

  He slid out of bed, wincing when his bare feet hit the icy floor. The stone left by the aliens who had built his house was smooth, but it was also cold. He pulled on his leather pants and shoved his feet into his high-topped boots. The shirt was from the night before, but he had only worn it two days, so he considered it clean enough to hunt varmints.

  Grabbing his night-vision enabled helmet and his pulse rifle, he stepped outside into the inner Bailey. An area adjacent to his living quarters, but inside the high walls made of iridescent stone left by the Aliens. His grandparents had selected it as a prime spot for the kitchen garden. The area had no roof, but the walls were tall enough to keep out most of Lemuria’s larger predators and wandering herbivore herds. Usually, the walls kept his vegetable garden and the bird coop safe from predators. He had built a fence with access to his Elfs and Raffe corrals and sheds on one end of the Bailey. The exterior corrals also had high walls, but the end open to the valley was edged with a more modern contrivance—a shock fence.

  Elfs were draft animals, as large as earthly elephants, with long wooly coats that could be sheared and woven into cloth. Both bulls and cows possessed sharp tusks which usually provided all the protection a herd needed. Like the elephants they had been nicknamed after, they also had a long prehensile trunk with long fingery appendages on the end. It served as a nose and occasionally a hand. Their wide ears hung from the tops of their heads and helped protect their eyes and faces.

  The Raffe’s were riding animals; tall, spindly legged critters with triangle shaped heads set on their long necks, a smooth, straight back that would hold a saddle if it was fastened on with chest and rump straps in addition to the cinch.

  Both herds were quiet, although the Raffes were restless, but they always were. He glanced at Lucy. She was staring at the garden.

  Zach stopped and stood still about thirty yards from his garden. Even with the night-vision visor, it required concentration to distinguish shapes. Lucy whined and his hand dropped to her head, a signal to be quiet.

  It was more of those bloody Coney Rats. The Coney Rats were the scourge of Lemuria’s farmers. They ran in large family groups and could clear a crop field in a few hours. Smaller than Lucy, the Coney Rats were no match for her individually, but in a horde, they could beat her senseless. They weren't actually rats, being genetically closer to earthly rabbits. The Coneys had excellent tasting meat, and a strong, thick skin, covered in long fluffy hair which could be scraped and woven into light cloth suitable for summer clothing.

  He took aim with his rifle and downed six of the invaders before they realized he was shooting at them. He got six more as the horde leaped for the fence to escape. Their powerful back legs easily allowing them to jump to the top. He got several more as the horde went over the high wall in a wave. The rising sun hitting the top of the wall silhouetted the rodents, making them easy targets.

  By the time Zach had collected his bounty, ensured any survivors passed into the ether, and hung the carcasses in his butcher shed under stasis to keep until he had time to deal with processing the meat, the Sun Risers were griping to be let out and fed.

  He opened the coop, and a dozen or so balls of fiery colored fluff bounced out. The sheer mass of the Ball of bright feathers on each bird not only made excellent decorative items, but their feathers also made it hard for predators to tell where their plumages ended, and the bird's body began. Unwary predators often came up with a mouthful of fluff instead of a piece of bird anatomy.

  Zach scattered some cracked corn for them and went to turn off the shock fence so the Raffes and Elfs could graze in the area just outside the compound.

  He was looking forward to eating breakfast when the com link chimed. Hastily running his fingers through his tangled mane of dark hair, he answered it.

  The woman on the other end was Terella van Horn. Among other things, the van Horn’s handled the insertion of new-commers into Lemurian society and had been instrumental in stopping the revolt that nearly captured the portal last year. The van Horns, like Zach’s family the Tylor's, were one of Lemuria’s Founding Families. Although Lemuria was the first world the town of Laughing Mountain discovered able to support human life, it had been a hard sell until the Alien Ruins had been found. On earth there existed a group of people who believed Aliens had visited earth in the distant past, but they hadn't found much actual evidence to prove it. Laughing Mountain was willing to sell access to Lemuria if the proposed colonists were willing to never attempt to publish their findings on earth. If Earth's Portal Authority had discovered the existence of a gate leading to an unauthorized world, it would have destroyed the colony and the town which ran the illegal Portal, so the terms of the sale had included a non-disclosure clause.

  Although not as well financed as the planned colonies of Barsoom, Arcadia, and Shangri-La, the Founding Families who made up the first two hundred Lemurian colonists were an organized group of historians and scientists who pooled their money to purchase farming, mining, and communication equipment to send through the Portal. They also invested in seeds for crops and weapons for defense against the large animals already inhabiting the planet.

  To survive Lemuria's predatory plants and animals, the Founding Families realized they needed to learn to work together fusing their interests to become a community. Since the first arrivals, other colonists had trickled through the Portal, and the original society had become somewhat fractured, but the laws and government created by those first families had held up well.

  Terella was a few years younger than Zach. She always presented the fresh, button-downed picture of a sophisticated academic. Her white-blond hair was drawn back in a neat twist, showing off her fine-boned face with its generous, wide lipped mouth and dark grey eyes. Today she wore a pale pink blouse, demurely buttoned up to her slim neck and a pair of dark grey trousers. For some reason that prim air attracted Zach; he always had the urge to grab her and physically mess it up.

  He wished fervently he had had time to shower and shave before she called. Ruefully, he put the wish aside and got down to business; Terella wouldn’t have called him unless she had a job for him.

  “What can I do for you, Miss van Horn?” he asked.

  “Are you up for a guide job?” she asked.

  ‘I might be,” he said cautiously, swiftly calculating the amount of money he had locked up in his hidden safe. If the job paid enough, the extra money might mean he could enclose the lower end of the valley to plant several fields. “Who is it for and how much does it pay?”

  Terella smiled at him. He was entirely unaware of the masculine impact he made on women, even needing a shave and grubby from lack of sleep and collecting Coney Rat corpses. His blood-spattered tee shirt clung tightly to his brawny shoulders and chest. Corded muscles in his powerful biceps and forearms stuck out of the sleeves.

  “It’s a family of newcomers,” she said. “A Professor and Mrs. Lamont. They have two kids, a boy about thirteen and a girl about sixteen. They want to go out to the Halivaara Wheel by the Scarlet Lagoon.”

  Before colonists had arrived on Lemuria, a mapping drone had explored the planet. Topographical printouts of its findings were stored in the Government House Library. There were no recognized trails through the Duranga Savana, the prairie between the town, the Faraway Mountains to the north and the Shimmering Ocean to the south. The Halivaara Wheel had shown up next to the Scarlet Lagoon as several large circles of the Alien's iridescent material with spokes leading from the center and connecting the outlying circles. Unlike the smaller ruins left by the aliens, an estimate of its size was nearly seventeen kilometers, nearly three times as large as any other settlement found.

  If they made it to the Wheel, Lamont's expedition would be the first to reach it. Despite the yearning to find and explore anything left by the Alien Forerunners, the planet itself had made concentrating on anything but survival difficult. An
earlier attempt to reach the Halivaara Wheel in a dirigible aircraft, had come to grief when the vessel was attacked by a pair of Harlequin Dragons. Harlequin Dragons were about half the size of the dirigible, but their attack damaged it, creating a large hole allowing the gas keeping it in the air to escape. It was forced to land before it crashed. Unfortunately, the explorers who had risked everything had no more money to build a second dirigible or repair the damaged craft, so they limped back into Shellgate several months later.

  Harlequin Dragons bore some resemblance to the descriptions of those found in earthly myths, hence the name, but they were Avians, with contrasting tiny feathers in patterns of red, black, and turquoise on their heads, necks, wings, and chests.

  “How new are they?” Zach asked suspiciously. Bear Leading newcomers through the hostile area to the site could be difficult.

  “Pretty new,” Terella admitted. “He’s willing to pay.” She named a price high enough to enable Zach to enclose the field and still have a little left over.

  “What’s the catch?” Zach asked. “For that price the guides in town will be falling over themselves to take it on. Why me?”

  “Some of them might abandon the Lamont’s in the middle of the journey. He’s—arrogant. I know if you take the job, you’ll stick to it.”

  Zach translated this: the man was a jerk who didn’t take orders.

  “Uh—huh.” He named a price half again over what she had quoted. They dickered for a few minutes, finally settling on a price that included feed for himself and his animals and paying for a crew to help with the travel and outfit the expedition, as well as a bonus for aggravation.

  “I’ll see you in a few hours,” he told her. “I have some arrangements to make here first. If he and I can’t come to an agreement, I get a deposit for coming in to meet him," he warned her.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Ten minutes later with his unruly hair tied back and wearing a cleaner shirt, he headed out the door. On the way out he grabbed a couple of smoked meat strips for himself and Lucy to eat on the way.