JUSTIN BOHARDT

111 Souls

Infinite Universe

Book 1

 

A decade has passed since the Gael conquest of Earth and her allies, and Captain Matthew Jennings has a ship and a good crew: a Cajun first mate that fought with him in the Gael War and cooks like an angel, a doctor from Scotland who picked up his trade while serving a life sentence in prison, and an engineer from Pasqua, a being whose entire race seemed to be born engineers. Jennings’s only problem is that they are flat broke. The universe might be infinite, but the number of ways to make a living was not.

 

After their last bounty hunting job went south, the crew of the Melody Tryst finds themselves with no money, no fuel, no food, and several pesky warrants currently outstanding for their arrest. So when the leader of the Gael occupation force offers Jennings a life line in the form of a plain and simple bounty hunting job, he reluctantly accepts, even if it means working for his former enemy.

 

The job is a simple bounty hunt, collecting a radical college student named Michelle Williams, who stood accused of treason, terrorism, and being a member of the Terran Resistance. As much as Jennings despised the Gael, he held an even greater hatred in his heart for the Resistance. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of pretend soldiers who had not bothered to pick up a weapon in the Gael War and now bombed civilian targets in the hopes of hitting the occasional Gael or human collaborators.

 

Not everything is as it seems.

 

Michelle Williams has been on the run for weeks after seeing her boyfriend get murdered, and has been forced to dodge multiple assassination attempts, escape police custody, and deal with gangsters that would sell her into slavery. Most importantly, she had no idea why any of this is happening to her. The closest she has ever come to actually committing a crime is when she and some of her college friends staged a sit-in in her college’s administrative building as a demonstration against the Gael’s occupation of Earth.

 

What neither Matthew Jennings nor Michelle Williams know is that the Gael Overseer Pahhal has a list of one hundred eleven humans- one hundred eleven humans that the Gael desperately need, the mere prospect of their capture having driven his people to go to war with Earth. One hundred and ten of those humans have been captured- Michelle Williams is number one hundred eleven.

 

As Jennings and his crew expend every resource to find Williams, they find themselves on the wrong side of a diminutive Russian bounty hunter whose viciousness is immeasurable, an interstellar crime lord who enjoys trafficking in the flesh trade, a coldblooded assassin who freelances for the Resistance, and the humans of the Terran Gael Force, an army made of those who chose to collaborate with the Gael. All of whom are hell bent on killing Matthew Jennings and claiming Michelle Williams for themselves. Surrounded by fire on all sides, Captain Jennings begins to realize that the plain and simple bounty is a hell of a lot more complicated than he could have ever imagined and that he is the center of plans that have been ten thousand years in the making. All in a day’s work though for the captain of the Melody Tryst.