By
Liza O’Connor
How to get along in the SkyRyders. Be male and don’t fly
better than your captain. Have your family send their best sweets in your
monthly care package so you can give them to your captain. Accept your position
as Dog for the first year of training.
If you are female, expect to be abused, tormented, and
diminished, because as far as the captain is concerned, females are only good
for one thing. And if you refuse to play, prepare to die.
So what’s going to happen to Alisha when she flies with
skills far beyond her captain’s and knows him to be the one who murdered her
friend?
Read the excerpt below
Scavenger’s Mission
Blurb
Meet Alisha: A young woman who refuses to live the life her
parents want.
In a single month,
Alisha Kane has gone from a wealthy debutante to street girl to scavenger. While testing her new flying skills in the
Cully Canyon, Alisha incurs a near-death crash
landing. She’s “rescued” by a colonel of the SkyRyders and her life changes
forever.
Meet Logan: A SkyRyder colonel in charge of a sleepy fort
with little to do other than arrest the occasional scavenger.
For the first time in
his life, Logan’s attracted to a young woman, only she’s probably a scavenger
and he’ll have to arrest her. But first, he offers her a shower and food while he checks on his crew. His videographer
has captured her extraordinary flight through the Cully and her flying is
astounding!
He forgoes arresting
her and puts his career at risk by asking MAC to assess her skills and
integrity as a potential SkyRyder. If he can get Alisha into the SkyRyders, it
will be his greatest contribution to the Corps.
Meet MAC: The Artifical Intelligence that runs the SkyRyders
Corps.
Upon seeing her
arrival, MAC upgrades Alisha’s test. Her flying skills are not just excellent;
they exceed what was previously thought possible. MAC classifies her as its top
asset and soon she proves her value.
But…the SkyRyders remain
a male-dominated Corps where Alisha’s sense of right and wrong often clashes
with her superiors. How long can a rebellious young woman survive in a
regimented Corps?
Excerpt
After her third stall-out and dunking on the ridge, Alisha
attempted to out-climb him, but Washington and Ollie were behind her, diverting
a major portion of her wind. All she did was increase the distance of her fall
when she stalled. Thank God the suit she wore was three sizes too large, for it
helped her to slow the descent and direct her fall into an overhanging tree so
the wind-catcher caught in its limbs, preventing her from smashing down onto
pointy granite rocks at high speed.
When the tree limbs broke from the force of impact, she
still fell and hurt her knee in the tumble, but at least she lived.
She had hoped DC would be satisfied with the results of the
day. She’d been thoroughly beaten, humiliated, and humbled. While severe, her
injury would not cause him censure. His punishment had been perfectly planned
and executed.
To her shock, he commanded her to get up and take another
run. Alisha realized something had broken in his twisted mind. It wasn’t his
intent to punish her. He planned to kill her.
Thus, Alisha saw no alternative but to fly into the wind farm.
Using a standard catcher, death was a probability, but if she didn’t escape DC
and his obedient squad, she now realized death was a certainty. If his intent
had been anything but murder, he would have stopped after the last crash.
How she managed to turn and steer her clumsy catcher into
the farm, she didn’t know. Feigning left, she pulled the catcher hard right,
aiming between two rows of invisible blades. The greatest danger was that the
wind would blow her catcher into a blade. There would be no recovery. Within
seconds of first contact, the blades
would reel her in and chop her body into a thousand pieces.
Without question, she’d be safer if she just collapsed her
catcher and hit the ground, but if she landed too close to the border of the
farm, DC could hunt her down on foot. With her leg busted up, she’d be the
slowest rabbit he’d ever bagged.
Alisha held the catcher steady against the west wind until
she estimated she was a mile into the farm. She released her harness at the
exact same time she collapsed her catcher. She hoped it would fall safely to
the ground and not wrap up in a wind generator, but if it did, she sure as hell
didn’t want to follow it up.
She hit the ground favoring her strong leg, but it didn’t
matter. The pain was so intense that she rolled into a ball, trying desperately
not to black out.
“Get up,” she warned herself. “Hide the catcher and get away
from here.”
Somehow Alisha forced herself to move farther into the farm.
She didn’t worry about leaving prints in the sand. The wind blew so hard any
footprints disappeared in seconds.
After walking over half a mile east into the farm, she
noticed blood dripping from her knee. She unzipped her suit and pulled off her
shirt, wrapping it tightly around the open wound. The pressure hurt like hell,
but she had to stop the bleeding. While the sand covered the drops of blood in
seconds, the tracking gear DC had could still follow it.
Realizing they had to be close behind, she altered her
direction and headed south.
A sense of danger made her turn around. When she did, she
saw the laser bead on her shoulder. She weaved through the windmill posts,
hoping the metal would confuse the bullet as it attempted to follow the path to
its target. When she heard the bullet ricochet on metal, she stopped for a
moment and re-assessed the situation.
SALES LINK
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About the Author
Liza O’Connor lives in Denville, NJ with her dog Jess. They
hike in fabulous woods every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow. Having an
adventurous nature, she learned to fly small Cessnas in NJ, hang-glide in New
Zealand, kayak in Pennsylvania, ski in New York, scuba dive with great white
sharks in Australia, dig up dinosaur bones in Montana, sky dive in Indiana, and
raft a class four river in Tasmania. She’s an avid gardener, amateur
photographer, and dabbler in watercolors and graphic arts. Yet through her
entire life, her first love has and always will be writing novels.
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