Evangeliya Read online

  Learn the origins of the Endurance.

  Terra, Luna, Mars, the Belt…war rages, while Terra’s environment slowly fails.

  Torill Darya will sacrifice her marriage, her health, even her life,

  in order to see her work on humanity’s generation ship completed,

  for it is the one hope left to mankind.

  Discover the heartbreaking truth of how the Endurance left Earth.

  Get a copy of Forever, free.

  See details at the end of this book.

  Table of Contents

  Learn the origins of the Endurance.

  About Evangeliya

  Praise for Evangeliya.

  Title Page

  The Endurance Timeline

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Did you enjoy this story? How to make a big difference!

  The next book in The Endurance series.

  Learn the origins of the Endurance.

  About the Author

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Copyright Information

  About Evangeliya

  He must choose between the woman he loves and the child he has always wanted…

  Liya and Gelin have worked for ten years to find a way to live together, despite few resources and less hope. Then Gelin learns he has been selected to become a parent…and the other parent is not Liya.

  Evangeliya is part of the science fiction romance series readers are calling gripping, superb and fantastic. Written by award-winning SFR author Tracy Cooper-Posey, it is set aboard the closed-system marathon-class vessel Endurance, a generation ship a thousand years from its destination. If you like the smart, romantic SF of authors like Linnea Sinclair and Anna Hackett, you will love the Endurance series.

  Dive into this thought-provoking new romance series today!

  __

  This book is part of The Endurance SFR series:

  0.5 5,001

  1.0 Greyson’s Doom

  2.0 Yesterday’s Legacy

  3.0 Promissory Note

  3.1 Quiver and Crave

  4.0 Xenogenesis

  5.0 Junkyard Heroes

  5.1 Evangeliya

  6.0 Skinwalker’s Bane

  …and more to come!

  A Science Fiction Romance Novelette.

  Praise for Evangeliya.

  Even though this is a very short story it is a VERY GREAT story.

  I was converted to the world of Sci-Fi books with this series and I have not looked back.

  Tracy has a talent for pulling the Reader in to the worlds she creates, hooking you on wonderful characters with vivid story lines and making you never want to leave.

  There is so much emotion in this beautiful story.

  Wow! This story is a novelette but it packs a punch with all that happens.

  So beautifully written that I was fully (re-)immersed in the world of the Endurance spacecraft within the first few pages!

  I loved the ending of this story and how "Evangeliya" came to get her name.

  A novella length episode, but has a full-length novels’ worth of emotion in it!! Brilliantly written and leaves you breathless.

  Tracy really wowed me with this one.

  Wow! And I thought that relationships had it hard in this day and age.

  It's so rare to find a sci-fi series where each book just keeps getting better than the last.

  The Endurance Timeline

  Ship Years 210 – 219

  The events of Greyson’s Doom

  Ship Year 313

  The events of Yesterday’s Legacy

  Ship year 381

  The events of Quiver and Crave

  Ship Year 402

  The events of Promissory Note

  Ship Years 499-501

  The events of Xenogenesis

  Ship Year 526

  The events of Junkyard Heroes

  Ship Year 533

  The events of Evangeliya

  Ship Year 535

  The events of Skinwalker's Bane

  Ship Year 735

  The events of 5,001

  Note: This is the chronological order of events aboard the Endurance. To fully enjoy the series and avoid spoilers, it is recommended you read the series in series order (see About Evangeliya).

  Chapter One

  Gelin was moving down the silent corridor between the apartments as Liya came out of the empty apartment next to hers and palmed the lock. She didn’t need to see his face to know something was wrong. He was here in the middle of his outside shift on the skin of the Endurance. As it took nearly forty minutes to get back inside, cycle through the airlock and get out of the suit, even without a shower to clean up the sweat, no one came inside in the middle of a shift unless they really had to.

  His face, though, confirmed something had happened. His dirty blond hair was standing up at wild angles. It was thick and normally had a life of its own, only now it looked as though he had been pushing his hands through it over and over, as he did when he was under pressure.

  His eyes were blank. Shocked. The blue looked faded. He stopped right in front of her. His hand trembled when he rested it against her neck and brushed his thumb over her jaw.

  Liya held his wrist, her heart running fast. “Tell me.”

  Gelin swallowed. “Inside, first.” Even his voice was strained.

  They were standing right next to the door. Liya pressed her palm against the lock and they moved inside.

  There was only one place they could sit comfortably—her narrow bed, which she disguised during the day as a sofa with a row of cushions along the edge of the bed pushed up against the wall. Clients sat there, when they were not trying on garments.

  The rest of the small, one room apartment was primarily taken up by the two huge work tables and her drawing board, plus the cupboards and shelves, drawers and boxes and more shelving units that contained the tools and supplies of her profession. Every centimeter of horizontal space was holding up something. Even the canisters at the back of the small kitchen counter were filled with buttons and closures and other embellishments, instead of food ingredients. The bathroom cupboard wall was punctured with hooks holding up her rulers and curves.

  Normally, Gelin could not resist commenting about the explosion of what he called ‘stuff’, scattered over the work tables and counters. Liya kept her workspace tidy, though. She picked up and put away when she was done with a stage of a project, so there was only the current work and its tools spread across the table. She didn’t have the room to work any other way. The equipment that was out at any one time made perfect sense to her. None of it made sense to Gelin at all, even though he had often asked her to explain the functions of different tools.

  Clients were the same—they would look about with a puzzled air. When everyone on the ship could pull up a file and print any garments they needed, the intricacies of hand-making clothing were completely unknown.

  Today, Gelin was silent as he padded over to the bed, which built her fear. Instead of sitting next to him on the bed as she would normally do, Liya settled on the rolling stool and pushed it until she was right in front of him.

  Gelin gripped his strong hands together, making the tendons in his forearms flex and the muscles to bunch. He wasn’t looking at her.

  Liya waited, her heart thudding unhappily. Gelin couldn’t be rushed. It was rare enough for him to speak of what was on his mind in the first place.

  He must have sprinted inside. The shirt he wore under his environmental suit was still damp with the sweat and moisture that accumulated when skinwalkers worked as hard as they did inside air-tight envelopes of micro chainmail and goofygel. He hadn’t stopped to shower or change.
<
br />   If Gelin had retuned inside, his current partner, Maria Pater, would have been forced to come in, too. They would both lose the shift’s bonuses. Liya had often heard Gelin speak with derision about other skinwalkers who did that to their partners.

  Liya pressed her lips together and forced herself not to speak, even though her fear was increasing.

  Gelin lifted his whiskered chin and met her gaze. “They offered me a baby.”

  Liya held still, absorbing the news. Being offered a baby was supposed to be happy news, except Gelin looked as he had when his crew had lost Alikhan Reynolds from an explosive decompression of his suit.

  Gelin watched her. He was waiting for her to put it together, to understand.

  Liya replayed his statement in her mind. They offered me a baby.

  Me.

  Not her. Only Gelin.

  They had talked before about what they would do if they were ever offered a baby. It had been theory, all of it. Finding a place big enough to hold her business and the two of them, that they could actually afford, had taken up most of their attention for years now. Of course, a baby would have changed their priorities, yet the chances were slim they’d be picked.

  Now, Gelin had been picked.

  Just not her.

  Liya’s breath whooshed out of her, leaving her feeling heavy and stunned. “That’s wonderful,” she whispered, because it was good. It was miraculous. At the same time, she was trembling. She wanted to be happy for him, yet all she could think of was how this would affect them.

  Relationships rarely lasted if one of a couple was a parent. Parenting took too much time and energy. It drained creativity. Parents went short on sleep. Their priorities shifted so sharply they could barely relate to the one they had been with before the baby had arrived. They suddenly had nothing in common. She had seen it happen with others.

  Her tears surprised even her. They welled suddenly, making her throat hurt and her eyes to ache. Before she could hide them, they spilled, rolling down her cheeks.

  Gelin closed his eyes, his face working as if he was in pain. She had done that, by crying. The knowledge only made her cry harder. She shook with it.

  “I’ll say no.” Gelin’s voice was hoarse.

  “You c-can’t say no!” she cried, her voice wobbling. “It’s a baby!”

  “I can say no if I want.”

  “No one ever says no.”

  “I have a right. I can if I want.”

  “The AI picked you for a reason,” Liya replied. “If you don’t take the baby, then it will be given to someone else. Someone who isn’t as suitable as you. What if they don’t take care of the baby the way they should? What if they’re cruel or indifferent?”

  “What if I am?” Gelin demanded, suddenly angry. His eyes glittered. “I don’t know anything about babies or children. I’m a skinwalker! I don’t even know what the AI was thinking, giving a baby to a skinwalker!”

  He stopped suddenly, not because there was nothing else to say, but because he always refused to talk about the shortened life expectancy of the skinwalkers. They risked themselves every day, on every shift. Alikhan Reynolds had not been the first to die out there.

  Liya let out a shaky breath. “You’ll make a great father. No one knows what they’re doing, in the beginning. You’ll learn.”

  Gelin shook his head. “I don’t want the thing.” He said it harshly. “Someone else can have it.”

  Liya knew he was saying it that way, calling the baby a thing, to pretend he didn’t care. “You do want the baby. You always have. Now, you will get one.”

  He shook his head. It wasn’t the sort of head shake he gave when his mind was made up. Liya knew that little shift of his chin very well indeed. Once he’d decided, no one could talk Gelin into doing things differently. It was one of his more endearing qualities, that strength of mind. Only, there was no flint in his eyes now. Just hurt and fear.

  Liya frowned. “Who is the other parent?” she asked.

  Gelin sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I haven’t agreed to this.”

  “Of course it matters,” Liya said. “You’re going to be living with her for twenty years…” Her throat closed up and the words faded and shook. The reality of it hurt. Gelin was going to be sharing his life with another woman for twenty years. Living with the other woman. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t love her. Liya knew in her bones that he would never betray Liya’s trust. Gelin wasn’t like that.

  What really hurt, what sliced through her chest and made it feel as though someone was trying to tear it open, was that he would not be living with her. They had been working for ten years to make that happen—to find a way they could live together, in an apartment with room for both of them and the physical requirements of her work. So far, they had failed, although her income had risen to the point where she could afford this tiny apartment in the more prestigious Aventine, instead of the Second Wall slice where some clients refused to go.

  The other woman would get to share all the little daily intimacies with Gelin, not Liya. The other woman would work with Gelin to rear the child, instead of Liya.

  Liya closed her eyes and tried to stop crying, only she couldn’t draw a deep enough breath. Her chest was too tight.

  Gelin picked her up. He was more than strong enough. She was plucked off the stool as if she weighed nothing and put on his lap. His big arms came around her and she leaned into him, her face against his shoulder, hating herself for being petty and jealous.

  He didn’t tell her it would be alright, that everything would be fine. She was glad he didn’t. It would have made this worse, if he’d lied to her. Instead, Gelin just held her and wordlessly comforted her.

  When she could draw a normal breath at last, she rested passively against him and said, “We’ve worked so hard. Then, just like that, it’s gone.”

  Gelin sighed.

  They both looked up as the door chimed.

  A client. Now.

  “You have an appointment?” Gelin asked. His voice was raw.

  “It’s someone stopping by on a whim.” New clients often did that, in a sudden flurry of need. “I’ll ask them to come back.” She used a fold of his sleeve to wipe her face.

  Gelin put her on her feet. “Don’t lose a customer because of me.”

  Liya didn’t bother commenting. As far as she was concerned, the entire ship and everything on it could all go hang for the next however long she and Gelin needed to deal with this.

  She opened the door.

  The two men standing on the other side were strangers, so far as anyone on the Endurance was a stranger. Their faces were familiar, yet she had never met either of them in a formal way. Both of them were extremely good-looking in a dark, brooding way. Tall, dark haired, wide shouldered—although not big with muscle in the way that Gelin and other skinwalkers were.

  The impact of their presence, under normal circumstances, would have been breath-robbing, only Liya was numb to it right now.

  The one on the left was square-jawed, with black eyes and a chin dark with bristles. He swallowed as he took in her face, which must surely be red and swollen and still damp.

  The one on the right, with the trimmed beard and brown eyes so pale they were almost colorless and mesmerizing, gripped the other’s arm, just above the elbow and squeezed, prompting him to speak.

  “We’re looking for Gelin Merritt,” the first said. “The director at the Third Wall Institute said we would find him here.”

  As he spoke, the other man’s eyes glittered with sudden tears.

  That told Liya who this was, even without names. The man on the left, with the black eyes, was the other parent.

  * * * * *

  There was not enough room for everyone, so Gelin gave up the sofa and stood with his back against the edge of her drafting table, his arms crossed. Liya took her stool once more.

  The two men sat on the edge of the bed. Both of them looked uneasy. The one with black eyes was squeezing his hands toget
her the same way Gelin had, earlier.

  The one with the pale eyes that seemed to draw Liya’s gaze whenever she looked at him was the first to speak. “I’m Anar Bader,” he said quietly. “This is Evan, of course.” He glanced at Liya. “Evan Hendry,” he added, for her benefit.

  She nodded at his thoughtfulness. Had he guessed that Gelin had not yet got around to telling her who the other parent was? Or was he just thoughtful and presumed such details had been last on their list of concerns?

  Evan flexed and gripped his hands again. “I don’t know where to start,” he confessed.

  “You are together, you and Anar?” Gelin asked.

  “I thought we’d be together forever,” Evan said, his voice bitter. He closed his eyes.

  Anar rested his hand on Evan’s shoulder. He cleared his throat. “You’re taking the baby, aren’t you?” he asked Gelin. Then his gaze shifted to Liya. “He is, yes?”

  Liya’s eyes stung. “It isn’t up to me.”

  “No,” Gelin said shortly. “I’m not.” He reached out and took Liya’s hand. “I won’t.”

  “Me, neither,” Evan said shortly. “They cannot do this to us.” His jaw flexed. “It is inhuman.”

  “You were chosen because you will be the best father for this child,” Anar said firmly. “Both of you,” he added, looking at Gelin. “The AI rarely makes mistakes. It chose the two of you for reasons we may never fully understand. It would be callous to ignore that.”

  “Are you a coder?” Liya asked curiously.

  “I am a doctor,” Anar said.

  “He is a brilliant doctor,” Evan added. “He treats the Captain and most of her staff, just to begin.”

  Liya was impressed. Anar was young. Around his mid-thirties, she guessed, which made him only a little older than she and Gelin. Parents were normally about the same age, so Evan would be early thirties, too. For Anar to have built such a stellar roster of patients after only a few years of practice, meant he was gifted, indeed.