In The Beginning, Gail Daley [red white royal blue .TXT] 📗

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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.

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D2D e-book ISBN: 9781393267041

D2D Print Book: ISBN- 9781393010425

About This Book

IN THE LAST interplanetary war a bio-weapon killed or sterilized all the males on Vensoog. To keep the colony alive, the Matchmaker Program found ex-soldiers like Zackery Jackson a hard-as-nails ex-recon soldier without a planet to return home to, and offered him a new home on Vensoog if he is willing to marry a Vensoog woman. With his home world now pile of radioactive ash, Zack desperately needs a new home for himself and his kids, so he accepts the offer.

When the Matchmaker Program pairs him with Katherine O'Teague, heir to Veiled Isle, computer hacker and one tough lady, they both wonder iif it is a match made in Heaven or Hell. They need to find out quick, because the ruthless Thieves Guild wants their kids and the data cube they stole. And are ready to kill anyone who gets in their way.

Author's Note

This book was previously published under the title A Year & A Day as book 1 in the Handfasting Series. It had a few sales, but it wasn't selling as well as the quality of the book warranted. After consultation I was told that the title read like a romance book which was off-putting to science fiction readers, which is the genre it belongs in.

I have re-titled both the books and the series to better fit in the Science Fiction genre for which they were intended.

Gail.

A Year & A Day

Spring 250 A.C. (After Colonization)

Clan Meeting – Glass Castle

THE EXECUTIVE ruling body of Clan O’Teague occupied the council chamber of the Clan’s main seat, known as the Glass Castle, on the Southern coast of Glass Isle in the Dragon Sea. There should have been four women and two men, but the two male members had joined the military forces drafted by the Confederation and killed in action on a distant planet. Their heirs were both too young to serve, and no one had yet been elected to take their places.

Lady Genevieve, the Laird of Clan O’Teague was young for the office. She was in her early thirties, with fiery red hair, large almond shaped grey eyes and a tall, slim build. Despite her age and appearance, during the attack Genevieve had showed both the leadership and strength required to be the Laird.

It could be seen by their coloring that the women seated around the table were related. The three varied in age from sixteen to around forty-five. Lady Corinne was the oldest of the three, and her red hair was showing white amid the auburn. Her short, clipped nails drummed a tattoo on the table as she considered the solution her First Daughter, Lady Katherine, was proposing. Lady Corinne was Katherine’s aunt, and as the designated heir to her property, Katherine had taken her place as the Clan Representative on the National Parliament when Corinne retired to pursue her interest in writing a planetary history. Katherine’s hair was not so fiery a color as Genevieve’s and her eyes had more green than grey, but she shared the same slim build although she was shorter than her sister. Sixteen-year-old Lady Drusilla had only just taken her seat on the Decision-making Council and she was clearly uncomfortable with her new duties. Her pixie cut hair, a much darker red than either of her sisters, gleamed dully in the muted light from the crystal powered wall sconces, and her eyes were so dark a grey they almost appeared black. Drusilla was tiny; she was half a head shorter than Katherine and only came up to Genevieve’s shoulders. She cuddled her agitated Quirka and glanced nervously from one sister to the other.

The four women were attended by Quirkas, the small native pets adopted by most of the settlers. Quirkas most closely resembled an Old Earth Squirrel with the pricked ears and pointed muzzle of a fox; they were furred, with a large bushy tail and front paws that looked like human hands. Soft flexible quills that could be ejected for defense ran along the backbone up to the top of the head. When attacked the quills would stiffen, and sharp, acid-tipped retractable barbs appeared. The poison couldn’t kill anything as large as a human, but it could make one sick. Quirkas were chameleons; their body colors could change with their environment, but their natural color seemed to be a soft mottled yellow. They were empathic and developed life-long friendships with some humans. Their small size (about the size of a human hand) made them ideal house pets and vermin hunters. They mostly hunted the variety of small rodents and insects prone to infest homes and businesses.

"You’re going to put the cat-fox in the hen house with this one girl," Corinne remarked with just a hint of a laugh. "I think I’ll come to the next Parliament just to watch the fur fly!"

"I think it’s a horrible idea," Drusilla announced. "It’s so cold, letting a—a—program pick your husband! What about love? Don’t you want that?"

"I know it sounds cold, Honey," Katherine said. "And yes, I want my husband to love me just as much as I want to love him, but this solves our problem. If we don’t do something, this planet will be unpopulated in just three generations. If we want to preserve our way of life, we need fresh DNA sources. What works in our favor is there will be many male soldiers left homeless because their worlds