Vanguard Wing (Taken to the Stars Book 5) by J.N. Chaney & Rick Partlow

Author:J.N. Chaney & Rick Partlow [Chaney, J.N. & Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Variant Publications
Published: 2024-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

18

I liked watching the sunsets here.

They were pretty back on Sanctuary too, of course, but it felt like I hadn’t been there in forever. It was a home for other people, for the people we saved, not a place I got to live. Not a place I’d earned. I felt like I’d earned this sunset.

The best place to watch the sun set over the western hills was up on the wall…which was also a little dangerous, since the wall had been shot to hell during the battle. But there was one solid section on the western side of the city, an intact staircase leading to the battlements at the top. The whole thing was very medieval and I wasn’t sure why they’d bothered. Wendra would probably know. Maybe it dated back to before the Anguilar, had been around as long as Philos. Maybe there was some dramatic story behind it, a war between cities or dangerous natives that they’d had to guard against when they first settled here.

It was easy to imagine, staring out at the rolling hills, cloaked in green mystery. The sun shone gold over the mountains at the horizon, showing just a hint of white snow caps at the peaks. Planets were big. I mean, I should have known that already, being from one of them, but it was easy to forget when I only had time to visit one or two cities on each of them. Even on Sanctuary, I’d rarely gotten any farther away from the main settlement than the hiking trails in the hills a few miles away.

The problem was one of population, though I hadn’t realized it until a long conversation with Lenny. If planets were big, the galaxy was freaking huge, and the percentage of people who were willing to give up the familiar surroundings of home to settle on a strange world was vanishingly small. Most colonies had two or three cities max, with farming settlements or mining operations between them, and the smaller worlds like this barely had a million people in total.

The settlers would build a city around their initial landing zone and spread out from it, and there’d be no reason to build a second city until the farms and mines had extended so far away that another source of supplies, services and transportation was needed. They hadn’t reached that point on this world, yet. They probably wouldn’t have if the Anguilar had stayed in charge. Hard to have a population explosion when most of the young males were worked to death as slaves.

That was short-sighted on the part of the Anguilar, but then, from what I’d found out, this was their first try at conquest, here in our galaxy. Lucky us. I took one last look out at the sun-kissed hills, then clambered back down the stairs…carefully. It had rained in the early afternoon and the stone steps were slick, coated with algae and lacking any sort of handrail. OSHA would have had a field day with

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