An Accidental Goddess

350 Pages·2016·1.14 MB·English

by  Sinclair Linnea

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An Accidental Goddess
by Linnea Sinclair
(as Megan Sybil Baker)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
An Accidental Goddess
ISBN 1-55316-100-9
Published by LTDBooks
www.ltdbooks.com
Copyright (c) 2002 Megan Sybil Baker
Artwork copyright (c) 2002 Megan Sybil Baker
Published in Canada by LTDBooks, 200 North Service Road West, Unit 1, Suite 301,
Oakville, ON L6M 2Y1
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Baker, Megan Sybil, 1954—
An accidental goddess / Megan Sybil Baker.
ISBN 1-55316-100-9 (electronic) ISBN 1-55316-899-2 (REB 1100 & 1200)
I. Title.
PS3552.A37A65 2002813'.6C2002-904234-8
Dedication
To Rob: who after more than twenty years,
still finds me amusing…
To my feline four: Tammy, Artoo, Daq and Doozy,
thanks FUR your invaluable typing assistance…
To my readers and friends who hang out at my
Intergalactic Bar & Grille:
thanks for your hugs and high-fives!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 1
^ »

I
t wasn’t the first time Gillie had hazily regained consciousness flat on her back
in sickbay, feeling stiff and out of sorts. And unable to account for a missing two
or three hours. Pub-crawling did have its side effects.
But it was the first time she’d been unable to account for a missing two or
three hundred years. Not even a week of pub-crawling could explain that.
Three hundred forty-two years, sixteen hours, Simon’s voice stated clearly in
her mind. If you want to be absolutely accurate.
She didn’t. Her math skills had never been her strong point. And three
hundred years was a close enough estimate to cause her stomach to do flip-flops
in a way a bottle of Devil’s Breath never had.
The possibility that she’d died flitted across her mind—though logically
death wouldn’t have thrown her inexplicably into the future. Even so, she
thought it prudent to pull her essence out of her physical self and make a cursory
examination of her own body on the diag-table. By all appearances, she was still
short, blonde and very much alive. The readout on the medi-stat confirmed the
last part of her hastily conducted diagnosis. It detailed a few bumps and bruises
as well as notations on a mild concussion, no doubt the source of her blistering
headache.
A headache that wasn’t the least bit helped by whatever heathen concoction
was being pumped into her system through the round med broche clamped to her
wrist. Med-broches! Raheiran technology rarely used such invasive things. She
longed to alter its feed rate but knew her mental tinkering would likely set off
some alarm. She’d almost tripped a few when she’d awakened ten minutes ago,
groggy and achy, and tried to spike into this sickbay’s systems.
Impatience invariably leads to sloppy work, Simon had chastised.
Sloppy work, a bitch of a headache and a reality that suddenly did not make
sense.
How in the Seven Hells had she ended up three hundred years from her last
conscious moment, flat on her back in some unknown space station’s sickbay?
With Simon in a similar state of disarray a few decks below.
The Fav’lhir.
Ah, yes. Small matter of a large warship intent on her destruction.
Obviously, the Fav hadn’t succeeded. Though something had happened.
They’re vicious and powerful, Simon, but they don’t have time travel
capabilities. Neither do we. Someone or something else pulled us here.
Wherever “here” was. That much she ought to find out.
She stepped away from her diag-table and peeked around the corner of the
small room. Felt foolish and could hear Simon’s wry chuckle. No one could see
her.
At least, no one other than Simon, who, from his tone, was very aware she’d
pulled out of her self to explore her surroundings. Have a care, My Lady. You
were injured.
We’ve more serious things to consider than my few aches and pains. There
were two other patients in the sickbay other than Simon and herself, who were in
much worse shape than she was. She didn’t know them; there’d been no one on
her ship when the Fav had attacked. The girl on the diag-bed was too young to
be part of the squadron she’d worked with in the Khalaran Fleet. Almost
automatically, Gillie touched their essences as she walked by. Then she
sidestepped quickly, and unnecessarily, as a thin man in a blue lab coat hurried
past and into the corridor.
She followed him, and for the next fifteen minutes was thoroughly
astounded, and more than a little disconcerted, by what she saw.
Wide corridors were filled with people in various modes of dress, from the
utilitarian freighter crew shipsuits to more exotic costumes with flowing skirts
and elaborate fringed shawls. She heard all three Khalaran dialects, and a few
languages that were harder to identify. Rim world tongues, most likely, clipped
and rapid in their sound.
She raised her eyebrows at the anti-grav pallets trailing behind a group of
dockworkers, surprised by the pallets’ advanced configuration. Raised her
eyebrows further at the state-of-the-art holovid news kiosks and station diagrams
near the lift banks. Those she studied carefully, listening to the chatter around
her; tech talk about scanner arrays and enviro grids. That matched what she saw
on the diagram suspended three-dimensionally out from the bulkhead.
The Khalaran Confederation, with her assistance, had just been developing
the technology to create a deep space station the likes of which she looked at
now. At least, they had been a day ago.
Correction, three hundred and forty-two years ago.
Yet it wasn’t this jump in technology that bothered her. Nor this space
structure bristling with unexpected weapons and sensors and databanks. Nor her
headache. Or the stiffness in her left shoulder, the result of her sudden collision
with the bulkhead when the Fav’lhir ship had exploded a little too close for
comfort off her starboard side.
Even the unexplained, missing three hundred and some odd years failed to
bother her. Or the fact that, in those three hundred and some odd years, there’d
been no other Raheiran advisors in this sector.
Given her people’s minimal intervention policy, that was one of the few
things that made sense.
No, none of those things bothered her at all.
What really bothered her was something she had heard in the corridor
chatter, something she viewed on the news kiosks and station diagrams. And
finally, something she saw as she stood before the temple’s double-doored
entrance, shaking her head in disbelief.
What really bothered Gillaine Davré was that during her three hundred and
some odd year absence, the damned Khalar had gone on a shrine-building kick,
and made her into a deity.