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Full Steam Ahead PDF

190 Pages·2010·0.75 MB·English
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An eRedSage Publishing Publication This book is a work of complete fiction. Any names, places, incidents, characters are products of the author’s imagination and creativity or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is fully coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form whatsoever in any country whatsoever is forbidden. Information: Red Sage Publishing, Inc. P.O. Box 4844 Seminole, FL 33775 727-391-3847 eRedSage.com Full Steam Ahead An eRed Sage Publication. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2009 eRedSage is a registered trademark of Red Sage Publishing, Inc. Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.eRedSage.com ISBN: 978-1- 60310-448-7; 1-60310-448-8 Full Steam Ahead Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-1-60310-449-4; 1-60310-449-6 Full Steam Ahead MobiPocket ISBN: 978-1-60310-450-0; 1-60310-450-X Full Steam Ahead MS Reader ISBN: 978-1-60310-451-7; 1-60310-451-8 Full Steam Ahead HTML ISBN: 978-1-60310-447-0; 1-60310-447-X Full Steam Ahead ePub Published by arrangement with the authors and copyright holders of the individual works as follows: Full Steam Ahead © 2010 by Nathalie Gray Cover © 2010 by Kanaxa Printed in the U.S.A. ebook layout and conversion by jimandzetta.com Ful Steam Ahead *** By Nathalie Gray TO MY READER: Dashing pirates, odious villains and mouthy heroines fight for survival in this momentous steampunk story. I pulled out all the stops for this one. For those unfamiliar with this awesome genre, steampunk is a delightful mix of Victorian aesthetics and oh-so-shiny fantastical machines. If you enjoy a good historical romance mixed with an action ride that never stops, or a romance that will sweep you into a fantasy world of petticoats and steam pistols, armored dirigibles and floating fortresses, then FULL STEAM AHEAD is for you. Strap on your brass goggles, my lovelies, we’re weighing the anchor and hoisting the mizzen. Ahoy! Full Steam Ahead: Chapter 1 Clouds massed like god-fists low over the horizon, which only the peaks and dips of the restless ocean broke. Brown and gray slashed the purple sky. The temperature had dropped. High noon felt more like dusk. The sun had risen and then disappeared an hour later, going back to bed with the petulance of a moody teen, and Laurel had not seen it since. According to the met reports, she would not for several hours. Days, even. She rubbed her hair back into her baseball cap and then screwed it on low. She was only a couple hours ahead of the other sailboats and couldn’t afford to lose a precious minute or make a single less-than-optimum correction. The lone female among the twenty racers, she had more to prove than any of them. Plus, she had to prove something to herself. She’d sacrificed a lot for this, had fought and trained and worked hard for more than three years. But she was here now! A sense of exhilaration took her. She grinned despite the spray hitting her in the face, despite her lips cracking from weeks of wind and sun exposure. Or perhaps because of it. An adrenaline junkie at heart, she did not mind the conditions, quite the contrary. She’d always been this way, the reckless “stuntwoman” diving down the basement stairs with her big brother’s too-large hockey equipment taped on tight. Or a “pilot” at the command of her retrofitted pedal bike, complete with wings made of old umbrella parts. The bump on the bridge of her broken nose gave her a bragging right she still used at family gatherings. This race was just a normal continuation of the life she’d led so far. The Vendée Globe, the most grueling singlehanded yacht race around the world, had never been annulled for bad weather, even if the sixty-foot open sailboats took water in by the gallons. Below the whistling of the wind, the bilge pump’s rumble whirred beneath the deck. It had held so far. She closed her eyes to savor the sounds—the various metallic clings and clanks as rings and cleats struck the aluminum mast. A soothing rhythm. A slap of wind strained the mainsail. Laurel snapped out of her luxurious five minute break and leaned on the satellite dome, looking up. Dizzying, the tip of the mast swerved left and right against the darkening sky, forward and back with each wave while telltales and reef lines angrily flapped in the wind. The white and red hull—her main sponsor’s colors—glistened with the waves’ increasing intensity and force. “Benson!” crackled the radio. One gloved hand on the tiller, she stretched to reach the small handheld VHF radio strapped inside the instruments niche. Another couple inches to her five-foot-nothing frame would be nice sometimes. She dislodged the handheld from its Velcro straps and brought it up to her mouth. “Benson here,” she snarled with her lips against the radio. A wave forced her to make an adjustment, which slowed her down. She felt the boat sink deeper into the water, the mainsail sagging, beginning to luff. Every second counted. Shit. “If yoo vaunt to go beck home,” the man said. Swiss, maybe? Austrian? “No one voot say anyssing.” “You have a question or not?” She heard the mocking laughter. Moron kept his finger on the transmitter so she could hear his laugh. “Only one? Oo is in your kutchen vhile yoo are out playing vith saw boys?” Funny how anger dissipated the wet cold sneaking into her many layers of clothing. She reached for the whistle tied to her PFD, kept her thumb on the transmit button and blew a nice and loud tune into the moron’s ear. “Asshole,” she snarled after she spit out the whistle. Sexist jerks. She checked her watch. Damn. Her last correction would cost her a couple hours. She felt winds shifting again. Her uncanny skill had earned her the nickname la sorcière from the favorable French crews. She was no witch. Just a regular racer who had a knack for wind shifts. She felt the minute changes on her face and in the way the mainsail strained from the bottom part up instead of the other way around. Laurel shifted on the narrow, molded fiberglass seat—more like a ledge—to face starboard instead of port. As if she’d tuned it with a remote, the wind altered slightly by a few degrees. But she was waiting and she harvested each iota of energy by winching hard on the line and anchoring it into the clam cleat. The mainsail strained against its lines and moorings. With a sound like a giant water hose, the force of the wind pushed against the sails. The boat leaned portside. Laurel let out a whoop of thrill when the angle forced her to her feet. Above, the sky seemed to become a tableau from a mad painter. Slashes of gray and brown against purple. Temperatures dropped further. She shivered despite the nylon jacket, polar fleece sweater and Nomex undergarments. Because of her French Canadian father’s work as merchant mariner, she’d lived in Montreal for several years yet had never, ever been so cold. To her shock, she noticed ice forming on the glistening bow. What the hell was going on? Ice meant added weight to her boat, which could cost her more than just hours. “Benson,” the radio sputtered. “Oh, what now, you annoying prick!” She didn’t get up. Screw them. Screw their sexist jokes. “Benson…weather reports….” The radio spattered and fizzed, lost the channel, and then picked it up again. She recognized her shore crew manager’s voice. He sounded worried. Himself a seasoned seafarer and father of five girls, nothing fazed Jacques Durand. “Benson…sat phone….” She’d stuffed the satellite phone in the cabin earlier because she’d been in a hurry. She couldn’t put the autopilot on right now, not with the kind of weather presently assaulting her boat. Plus, she was having a riot of a time. This was true freedom. Alone on the open sea. Standing, she strained against the wind, mouth stretched in a wide grin, eyes set on the prize. Always on the prize. She could do this. She’d done this before, if never in this particular race. The boat responded by cutting the waves like a knife would meringue. The raging sea tried its best to suck her boat into the water. The mast quivered and bowed. The sails shivered. More ice accumulated on the bits and pieces of aluminum moorings, on a section of exposed lines she hadn’t touched in a while, on the bow. It even crystallized the water dripping off her cap. “Benson!” the radio clamored. “Argh, goddammit, all right!” She reached for the radio. Just as her fingers touched it, a blue arc of electricity linked her to the radio, which fizzed and went silent. She brought it up, mashed the button. “Benson here!” Nothing. Not even the deep-fryer sound. Laurel gave it a good shake, her usual way of fixing things. Still dead. Ahead, waves reached proportions she’d never encountered. The radio slipped from her hand. “Holy cow.” The size of that thing. Ragged scuds and vortices lined one of the biggest shelf clouds she’d ever seen. The large wedge-shaped cloud, low over the horizon, looked ominous enough for Laurel to zip her jacket all the way up. A sure sign of trouble. She was headed straight for a massive storm. No wonder Jacques had sounded worried. Her shore crew must have been going nuts trying to contact her. And the sat phone nice and warm in the cabin. The Swiss team’s sexist jokes had suddenly become the least of her worries. She had work to do and needed all her neurons. She’d call the team as soon as possible. For now, she was about to enter the ring with the deadliest of all fighters—the sea. “Here we go!” She released the line from the cleat, let it out a bit as she nudged the tiller, just a tad, enough to angle her boat at the massive series of waves coming dead center. The first, she crested diagonally, rode it up like a Russian Mountain and could almost hear the clack-clack-clack of the initial lift hill. High. Higher still. The boat crested the giant wave. A split second of quasi-zero g. Exhilaration. The thrill of anticipation. Laurel spread her feet wide and wedged her butt into the seat’s corner. Then descent. She yelled the whole way down. Shitloads of joules of potential energy transferred into the kinetic kind, propelling her downward at rates she’d be hard-pressed to gauge. Crazy Fast, if she were pushed to name it. The second wave, she didn’t take so well. Still winching in lines and keeping the tiller put with her knee for a hard tack, Laurel didn’t have time to adjust before the monstrous wall of water rose in front of her bow. A Hoover Dam made of liquid emerald. The sea was such a beautiful, beautiful bitch. The veritable mountain of water hit her boat slightly tighter than forty-five degrees to portside. The hull moaned, as did the mast. One of the instruments niche tethers snapped, which released the fire extinguisher to roll all the way back and stop between her feet. She couldn’t anchor it back into its place. It was all she could do to keep her boat from pulling a cartwheel. She crested just in time to see the third wave. “Damn.” She was so toast. But instead of slamming into the liquid version of Mount Fuji, her boat decided to do its own thing and swerved right. Before she could pull back from this demented course, the bow had already engaged three-feet deep into water, only to emerge and start to cut the base of the wave. Like surfing. On a sixty-foot open sailboat. Jesus! What the hell’s wrong with this ship! A sort of tunnel of water opened up in front of her. Water changed colors. Even the sky at the other end looked different. But it was better than taking a nosedive into unfathomable depths. Cursing and winching as hard as she could, Laurel aimed for the sky at the end

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.