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  Naero’s

  Run

  A Spacer Clans Adventure

  Book One

  Titles by Mason Elliott

  The Spacer Clans Adventures, Cycle One:

  Naero’s Run

  Naero’s Gambit

  Naero’s Fury

  The Spacer Clans Adventures, Cycle Two:

  Naero’s Mastery

  The Citation Series, Cycle One:

  Naero’s War, Book One: The Annexation War

  Naero’s War, Book Two: The High Crusade

  Naero’s War, Book Three: Naero’s Trial

  The Citation Series, Cycle Two:

  Naero’s War, Book Four: The Gamma Quadrant*

  Short Fiction in Ebook Format

  The Permit

  Fantasy with Author Garan R. R. Faraday

  Mergeworld, Book 1

  Mergeworld, Book 2

  Mergeworld, Book 3

  Mergeworld, Book 4*

  (*Forthcoming)

  Naero’s

  Run

  Mason Elliott

  High Mark Publishing

  www.highmarkpublishing.com

  Seattle & Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, London

  Naero’s

  Run

  by

  Mason Elliott

  © 2012 by Mason Elliott. All rights reserved.

  Published by High Mark Publishing

  ISBN 978-1-301980-71-0

  Cover Art by

  Frank Miller

  frankmillerdesign.com

  License Notes:

  This book or ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This work in any format may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Edition Notes:

  If you do not see this edition note here in this spot on the copyright page and on the very last page of your ebook or print version of this title, then you are not getting the final, polished version of this novel that the publisher, editors, and author intended for you to receive. Please contact either the publisher or the author via their emails or websites if you do not see the following update code:

  High Mark Publishing Update Code F1115A

 

  1

  The stars belong to everyone.

  That’s what Spacers believe.

  All of the sentient races–everything that exists–came from the stars. No one owns them.

  Whatever any other sentients and the Gigacorps claim.

  The stars are always free.

  In the end, everything and everyone returns to them.

  Naero’s parents, her friends, and her space-faring people taught her to cherish and respect the harsh beauty of space for what it was and for what it offered: Freedom. Challenge. Everything.

  Her mother was her sun, and gave her light, life, and love.

  Her father was her ship, her courage and adventure.

  In her Spacer Clan she found herself, others–knowledge, strength and joy.

  Naero woke up in her quarters and scribbled down the poetry and thoughts that had danced in her head while she snoozed. She scrawled on an old-style lighted pad with a pen she kept in reach of her bunk, the same way her illustrious father did.

  This was the way he taught her, to be a poet warrior, a philosopher king…or queen. This was the blood she came from.

  She let the pad fade, lay back down, and drifted off again, one night before her nineteenth birthday. One year to go before she’d come of age and could captain a ship–her own ship–just as her famous mother had done at that age.

  For a young Spacer warrior in her Clan’s merchant fleet, Naero often experienced strange, wildly vivid dreams when she slept.

  Tonight’s nightmare was exceptionally bizarre and frightening. As usual, she was fighting something.

  She struggled against some kind of devouring darkness. It penetrated her very flesh, violating her mind with horror and abject agony. No matter how she resisted, it absorbed her like a giant amoeba.

  Yet the attacking darkness came from within her as well, and that was the most frightening part of it all somehow. The fact that such negative energy and twisted desires were part of her, and she part of them.

  Parts of her secretly enjoyed some of those demented feelings–even yearned for them.

  They lusted for the destroying power to subjugate everything and everyone to her will, and inflict suffering and misery upon them all, crushing and decimating them under the grinding heel of her enraged might.

  Just as her strength to resist failed, right on the verge of her being swallowed up by the insane annihilation, the darkness parted.

  A shining, beautiful, green young man with flowing golden hair appeared, his blinding sword cutting through the deep shadows.

  She thrust both arms toward him for rescue.

  He plunged his blade through her forehead, transfixing her gasping face upon its blazing length. She heard, felt his voice in her mind.

  I’m sorry. This will not hold the Chaos back for long.

  He jerked his sword free…