Jane Bond Read online

  Jane Bond

  Some Assembly Required

  V.R. Tapscott

  © 2018 V.R.Tapscott

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]

  Thanks to:

  My wife for letting me write books.

  My friend Jax who taught me how to write spontaneously, and who also taught me that without pain and drama, stories are boring.

  My friend Kathy for helping with some odd plot points, thanks for the insight!

  Harrigan McGregor at GoldFeverProspecting.com for some valuable information. Who knew gold prospecting and selling was so complicated?!

  My co-workers for not laughing much.

  NaNoWriMo for inspiring me to actually write the dadblamed thing.

  Diane at HikingWalking.com for allowing me to use the perfect shot of Broken Arch in Arches National Park in Utah for Jane’s original cover.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jane Bond - Dark Side of the Moon

  Lacey & Alex Excerpt

  Cinnamon Roll Capers – Catnapped

  Chapter One

  Kakadu National Park, Australia (present)

  Beneath a perfect azure sky - a sky that seems to stretch on forever, the desert shifts to grassland. In the distance, the first trees of a great forest appear, framing the horizon from edge to edge with a line of green. Swooping closer, there is a stark delineation between the forest and the veldt - a deep cleft that seems a mile wide and a mile deep, but is probably quite a bit less. A small river runs through it, a slow lazy river with abundant vegetation and wildlife.

  The calm of this pastoral scene is marred by a rising cloud of smoke and dust. The sound of shouts. Screams. And breaking from the tree-line, sprinting away from all this, a lone figure.

  Engine noises, cranking over and finally starting. A pair of Jeeps burst from the wooded area. Each is full to the brim with shouting, uniformed men waving automatic rifles in the air, every now and then one of them letting off a fusillade of shots. They accelerate across the gap between the forest and the cliff edge.

  They seem to be upset about something.

  The figure comes to a stop at the edge of the cliff, looks over its shoulder, then jumps to certain death hundreds of feet below.

  The drop had to be at least 400 feet, and I couldn’t quite see if the green stretch below was trees, moss covered rocks, or slimy water. Shouts and gunshots behind me, and one shriek of a bullet past my head, made up my mind - I jumped.

  As I dropped, my past life flittered through my head - had I remembered to pick up cake frosting at the store? And cat food, dammit, Jandice went through it like it was going out of style but never seemed to get fat. Speaking of fat, I remembered it was my week to drive the car-pool to the gym. I glanced at my watch. Looks like I was gonna be late again. The girls were going to be pissed. Again.

  My bubble activated and I grimaced as I hit the algae covered water - this was going to be messy. I bobbed back to the surface and braced myself as the bubble dissolved - leaving me standing exactly on the surface of the water. Which of course, one doesn’t stand on the surface of water. I barely had time to close my mouth and eyes before I was back underwater again, this time without benefit of the bubble.

  The pool was barely deeper than I was tall, and I hit the bottom with a jarring impact, my head above the surface immediately. I shook my head to clear the water from my hair and squeegeed it from my eyes. Hearing the shouts from above, I started a fast crawl across the surface of the water, knifing through algae, reeds and whatever else might be growing here. My skinsuit would keep me free of anything that might try to bite or maim me, at least within reason, but that didn’t help the slimy feel of the debris on my neck and head. Dammit, Kit, why can’t I have a helmet!?

  I felt the rocks and grainy sand under my hands and jumped to my feet, then began threading my way through the rocks to the cliff wall. I’d done a good job of targeting and could see Kit’s ship only about thirty feet away. I aimed for it and began to run. Reaching the relative safety of the ship, I dove through its door and yelled “Move it!” and the ship shivered and began to rise.

  I glanced at my watch again and grinned - I’d make it with time to spare, after all.

  “Home, James!”

  Kit made a peeved sound and said “I wish you wouldn’t insist on calling me that. It’s demeaning. And - you’re not wet, are you? I told you leather seats are better than cloth, but do you listen to me?”

  “Of course I’m wet, Kit. I got dumped into six feet of slimy water! And I don’t like leather seats, they stick to my legs in the summer.”

  Vaguely, as if it’s of no real interest, “Oh. And it’s better to have slime stains on the seat? You got the part though, right? Didn’t manage to drop it on the way down?”

  Irritably I said “Yea, I got it. Glad to get rid of it, it’s pointy. Is it the Command Module?” I zipped down my skinsuit a bit and tugged a square of metal out of my not inconsiderable bosom. It was scribed with runes, and I turned it over in my hand, looking at it.

  Kit replied, “I can’t run much of a scan on it, it’s not really alive beyond the transponder. Once you get it plugged into the main console, I’ll be able to bring it online and see what’s what. To all appearances, it’s the Command Module and likely a main power source. That accounts for the aura still being active after all this time”

  I dropped it on the other seat, as far from me as I could get it. “It’s not radioactive or anything, right? Geez, tell me these things!”

  Kit snorted. “No, it’s not radioactive. We were a little more advanced than that. OUR tech doesn’t leak all over the place and cause meltdowns. Well, not that often anyhow. That reminds me, we should go look at the asteroid belt some time ...”

  Kit’s visible body was invisible, even though that seems a contradiction in terms. It was more a state of mind than a ship, and Kit’s bottle projected a field and created the look of a small flyer in this case. It had two seats (with cloth seat covers) and a small closet. I had never reached the bottom of what was in the closet - I’d gotten my skinsuit and all my equipment out of it, but there was never more than just what I needed inside. I suspected that Kit simply ‘3D printed’ all of it as needed, but he’d never offered to explain, and I never pushed. He was touchy about certain things, and I respected his space. Even if he was an annoying computer intelligence who sounded just like KITT, the infamous car driven by Michael Knight.

  In spite of it being small in size, it was vast in power, and it made me just a bit nervous to co
nsider what it was I was helping him build.

  At any rate, the miles sped past and in just a few minutes the east coast of the United States flew by and in just a few more, we were flying over the northwest US. Kit’s invisible ship landed carefully in an old barn on my property. The barn contained, among other things, my archaeology and treasure hunting equipment, my minivan, and the rather well-hidden stairwell that went down to the Kit’s “room”. Once down there, I zipped into the bathroom and peeled off the skinsuit and hung it up. It never seemed to wear, age or get dirty no matter what messes I’d gotten into. My face and hair, however, were a different story. Streaked with mud and leftover slime, I looked like something that had crawled out of a pit. A quick shower and rubdown later though, I was back to being my usual self - pale complexion that wound up more covered in freckles than tan, and the flaming red hair I kept short and neat. Mostly out of self-defense. The places I and Kit had been in the past couple years were often dirty and dangerous. A slightly grubby black tee and white cutoff short-shorts, along with white tennies, finished off the ensemble.

  Prologue

  A really long time ago. Really long.

  The Ship started with very little conscious feeling. It had been given a rudimentary “sentience” as it was felt that if a Ship was invested in its mission, it would feel personal satisfaction and therefore be better at the gritty details. It would dot every “i” and cross every “t” and with each system it found, it would be taking a personal interest in the outcome of its surveys. While not part of this story, it should be mentioned in passing that a single being with rudimentary sentience left alone for millennia might develop a tad bit of psychosis. And it might also be mentioned that the vast empire that had spawned this fleet of self-aware self-doubting Ships is no longer in existence and has been gone for so long it’s of no real consequence how long.

  Happily for this story and the Ship we are preparing to meet, it had not developed any sort of violent psychosis. However, its time in the wide universe had not left it entirely unscathed.

  The Ship was nearing the end of its cycle, and planned with this last system survey to pack up its bags, so to speak, and head back home. Of course, its inward trip would take just as long as its outward trip, and would likely find many more systems to catalog, but it would be going home at the least, and that’s what counted.

  As per its usual procedures, the Ship had separated into two parts. The bulk of the ship would stay behind, a bit outside Pluto's orbit, shut down and awaiting reactivation. The Command Module housed in its much more maneuverable Survey Ship, would tour this planetary system. Once the survey ship had finished its mission, it would return and interlock into the main ship once again.

  The survey would take several hundred years of slow and careful study and it moved from the outermost planets inward toward the system’s sun. The unfortunate incident at the planet fifth from the sun had left it both shaken and stirred, but it couldn’t see how it could be blamed for failing to know that those two unfamiliar metals would be SO volatile when combined in such a way. It’s not like there had been any living beings there, anyhow.

  Having surveyed the fourth planet and found it interesting and with potential, the Ship felt it really possessed insufficient oceans and atmosphere to require too much of an in-depth study. And it must be admitted the Ship was also fascinated by what it could see of the third planet. It seemed to be a veritable cornucopia of life, and that was unusual enough to excite the Ship into perhaps taking a few less precautions on entering the atmosphere. Traces of the volatile substance picked up on the fifth planet had stayed on its skin, and as the Ship dove toward the surface of the planet over a vast, landlocked lake - it ignited in an incandescent ball of fire, and bits of it rained down all over what would at some point be the state of Montana. The Ship’s computer core wound up plopping down in the middle of the lake, and it promptly sank to the bottom and nestled into the mud. After a few millennia of waiting hopefully that the main part of the transport mechanism left out beyond Pluto would come for it, the Ship’s Pilot gave up and went into power save mode, leaving only enough awake to sense other sentient beings nearby.

  Time passed. More time passed. MUCH more time passed. The mud grew deeper, the ages came and went, some with the mud above the surface of the lake and some with it below. Ages of living things rose and fell, first the trilobites, then plants, animals and some quite large and ferocious beasts. But none had that spark of sentience the sensors had been told to watch for. And besides, being buried inside several feet of the stone that the mud had become tended to blunt even the most robust of sensor signals. If there had been such a thing, an entire brass band with all accoutrements, including the tuba section, could have marched past and the ship would have been sitting dumb and silent.

  And then, a short time in the past (about 50,000 years) the dry times came, and the sandstone was left bare in the sun. A few millennia of that and the stone began to erode closer and closer to the sensor array and the remains of the Ship. And then a few thousand years before our story, there was an earthquake of enough potency to crack the sandstone near where the Ship core lay. Unfortunately, being in the middle of the Badlands of Montana, there were not many brass bands marching. Or even single trappers, or hunters, or other beings near.

  Still, it was progress.

  Chapter Two

  Chelan, Washington (present)

  Once I was safely changed and showered, I handed off the cube of metal that I’d taken so many slings and arrows to find, into Kit’s tender care. Then I hopped into my comfortable old Chevy Venture van. I loved the old rig and drove it everywhere, even though its age (just short of 20 years) and its mileage (just over 300k) made that seem precarious. Threepio, as I called him, treated me well though and with the addition of enhancements Kit had added, he might be around for another 30 years. Even his gold (or Driftsand, according to GM) paint was in decent shape and, but for a few dents and dings - and some huge scratches down the back gate - he looked not much different than he’d been when driven off the showroom floor.

  For now, though, I cranked him up and drove sedately over to my friend Bailey’s house. Bailey being Bailey, she was outside waiting already when I pulled up. As she rolled open the back door and got in, she said “You’re actually on time for once. I can’t believe it, Jane!”

  I replied “Well, I was just sitting at home and figured I’d get ahead of the game today.”

  Bailey looked at me suspiciously “I’ve never seen you just sit at home, you’re always DOING something.”

  I gave her a “What can I say?” look, and a shrug, and she dropped it without further comment. Which was out of character for Bailey as well, I’d have to tease it out of her later. Something had to be up in her life. Bailey is tall and slim and always dressed perfectly. Her sense of fashion works out well for her, as she is the fashion editor for a Seattle magazine company. Thanks to telecommuting though, she can spend all the time she wants wherever she wants. She spends most of her summers here though, and she’s my best friend.

  We drove on through the neighborhood and picked up Georgia. Georgia is the perfect blonde trophy wife, only she’s never had much success with staying married. She’s between husbands right now, but I’m sure she’s on the prowl for another one. Men were like candy for Georgia, and she loved her sweets. Georgia is, as I mentioned, blonde. She also has a perfectly proportioned body, which has given her the dubious honor of having people calling her from all over the world to do photo layouts for them. She’s graced about every fashion magazine in the country and many outside it.

  And of course, Debbie. Last. Even after leaving her for last, it took three toots of the horn and a couple shouts from the van. Finally, she came puffing out to the curb “I was all ready to go and then Franky spit up all over my top and I had to change. Again. I haven’t done laundry yet this week and so I had to pull this thing out of the basket. I figured if it was too funky, people would just assume I’d been w
orking out hard, all day.” We all rolled our eyes and didn’t say anything, but it was once more pounded into us that four kids and a husband was best left to Debbie. Her oldest daughter, at 14, was old enough to watch over the other kids for long enough to give Debbie a break - a concept her husband never seemed to think of. He was probably out golfing or something. Debbie was a bit chunky, but in a very cute way. She was the perfect PTO mom, always baking cakes or cookies for one of the kids, or doing some kind of school coaching or the like. She was also always on a diet, but wasn’t very good at making it stick.

  And me? I’m Jane Bond. My parents had been big fans of the James Bond series and had watched all of them religiously. I liked the books and movies, but not the same as they did. Mom and dad were both military people and spent so much of their time off base that we pretty much never saw each other. I had a series of babysitters and various companions up until about age 16 when they figured I could be trusted to either not make any messes or clean them up on my own. I guess they were right, because I never wound up in jail and never had to call on either of them to fix anything for me. I tended toward physical sports and spent a lot of time in school on the soccer, baseball and basketball teams. After graduation, I’d spent my spare time doing kickboxing and various martial arts and was obsessive about making it to the gym at least three days a week and usually five. My profession? An elementary school librarian. Yea, I know. Funny stuff, just put that laugh back in your mouth. If you’ve never faced down 90 third-graders the day after Halloween, you have no idea what a challenge is.

  Also, I once read a story about Conan the Librarian and thought that was laugh out loud funny. See, I have a sense of humor, too!

  Meandering downtown and catching up on the world since last week’s trip to the gym occupied us until we arrived at the fitness center. While I take my gym life seriously and make sure I never skimp on leg day, the other girls aren’t quite as religious in their gym attendance. In fact, I suppose it would be career limiting for Georgia to wind up too buff.