Read Online Barbarian Prince by Kaitlyn O'Connor - Free Book Online
Authors: Kaitlyn O'Connor
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Wherever they taking her, she didn’t think the people of the colony would be able to find her.
Granted, Monica might have been right in her assessment of the situation and rescue wouldn’t have been something she could count on where she’d been, but it had at least been a possibility! Now it definitely wasn’t because the colonists would have no way of figuring out where she was given that the range of their tracking implants had been calibrated to an area within twenty miles of the colony itself.
So she was on her own and she was going to have to keep her wits if she was going to survive!
That bracing thought required unfastening the harness and a making another trip to the facilities—which she’d, thankfully, found on her own through a narrow door that didn’t look big enough for the barbarian to fit through.
So maybe he hadn’t shown it to her because he didn’t know it was there? Because it was dusty and musty enough that it didn’t look like it had seen much use in years.
Actually, the entire ship smelled of fuel—frightening!—and dust— not comforting at all!
What did that tell her?
Not a hell of a lot when she couldn’t seem to gather her wits to analyze the situation.
Frowning, she struggled with the puzzle pieces she had. It would’ve been easier, she thought, if she’d had more than a couple, but she had what she had.
The aliens looked like the aliens on the colony world—well, some of them. As it was on Earth, there seemed to be several different races with different hair, eye, and skin colors. But these were recognizable, in her book, as being from the same origins and they didn’t appear to have evolved in a way that suggested there’d been a significant separation over time that would have necessitated diverging physical traits.
And yet, they were clearly separated! The ship was proof positive that they didn’t even share the same world—she didn’t think. Otherwise, why would they be in space?
It seemed inescapable that these barbarians were from the sister world simply because it was closest and she couldn’t imagine the ramshackle thing she was in making it any further! She was surprised it had made the first leg of the trip intact!
That sister world was horribly inhospitable, though! That was why they’d settled where they had. The other world had been just a little further out, but that was enough to make it bitterly cold in the winter and not terribly warm in the summer. Those inhospitable temperatures would translate to more fuel burned during the long, bitterly cold winter to just keep the colonists relatively comfortable and a short growing season that, when the colonists were entirely unfamiliar with the techniques needed to grow plants in this particular soil, could mean starvation and a complete failure of the colony.
New Earth—or K’naiper as the natives referred to it—was the best choice for a successful colony, the safest.
They’d thought.
They hadn’t actually expected the natives to be hostile, though. She supposed that was because they had a skewed perception of their self-worth. They’d thought the natives might be afraid of them—at first—but could be won over with minimal effort—gifts of trinkets and so forth. And the natives would be so grateful to have god-like beings living among them they would probably be more of a nuisance (worshipful) than any kind of threat!
Boy had they been wrong!
She shook that thought and dragged her mind back to picking at the puzzle.
The truth was, they’d been puzzled about the solar system they’d targeted for their colony before they left Earth. The ‘sister’ worlds orbiting in the system’s Goldilocks zone seemed to be in stable orbits, but they were far closer than any others they’d found—almost close enough that one could’ve been a satellite of the other at some point.
Or it was possible that the two sisters had originally been a single, much larger planet that had been split apart by
Granted, Monica might have been right in her assessment of the situation and rescue wouldn’t have been something she could count on where she’d been, but it had at least been a possibility! Now it definitely wasn’t because the colonists would have no way of figuring out where she was given that the range of their tracking implants had been calibrated to an area within twenty miles of the colony itself.
So she was on her own and she was going to have to keep her wits if she was going to survive!
That bracing thought required unfastening the harness and a making another trip to the facilities—which she’d, thankfully, found on her own through a narrow door that didn’t look big enough for the barbarian to fit through.
So maybe he hadn’t shown it to her because he didn’t know it was there? Because it was dusty and musty enough that it didn’t look like it had seen much use in years.
Actually, the entire ship smelled of fuel—frightening!—and dust— not comforting at all!
What did that tell her?
Not a hell of a lot when she couldn’t seem to gather her wits to analyze the situation.
Frowning, she struggled with the puzzle pieces she had. It would’ve been easier, she thought, if she’d had more than a couple, but she had what she had.
The aliens looked like the aliens on the colony world—well, some of them. As it was on Earth, there seemed to be several different races with different hair, eye, and skin colors. But these were recognizable, in her book, as being from the same origins and they didn’t appear to have evolved in a way that suggested there’d been a significant separation over time that would have necessitated diverging physical traits.
And yet, they were clearly separated! The ship was proof positive that they didn’t even share the same world—she didn’t think. Otherwise, why would they be in space?
It seemed inescapable that these barbarians were from the sister world simply because it was closest and she couldn’t imagine the ramshackle thing she was in making it any further! She was surprised it had made the first leg of the trip intact!
That sister world was horribly inhospitable, though! That was why they’d settled where they had. The other world had been just a little further out, but that was enough to make it bitterly cold in the winter and not terribly warm in the summer. Those inhospitable temperatures would translate to more fuel burned during the long, bitterly cold winter to just keep the colonists relatively comfortable and a short growing season that, when the colonists were entirely unfamiliar with the techniques needed to grow plants in this particular soil, could mean starvation and a complete failure of the colony.
New Earth—or K’naiper as the natives referred to it—was the best choice for a successful colony, the safest.
They’d thought.
They hadn’t actually expected the natives to be hostile, though. She supposed that was because they had a skewed perception of their self-worth. They’d thought the natives might be afraid of them—at first—but could be won over with minimal effort—gifts of trinkets and so forth. And the natives would be so grateful to have god-like beings living among them they would probably be more of a nuisance (worshipful) than any kind of threat!
Boy had they been wrong!
She shook that thought and dragged her mind back to picking at the puzzle.
The truth was, they’d been puzzled about the solar system they’d targeted for their colony before they left Earth. The ‘sister’ worlds orbiting in the system’s Goldilocks zone seemed to be in stable orbits, but they were far closer than any others they’d found—almost close enough that one could’ve been a satellite of the other at some point.
Or it was possible that the two sisters had originally been a single, much larger planet that had been split apart by
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