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Sleeping Beauty and the Last Spasm of a Rotting Corpse

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In the last ten days, something remarkable has happened. Thanks to your amazing help and generosity Return to the Galaxy, my debut sci-fi novel, has been shooting up the Space Opera charts and became the #3 Space Marines: Bug Hunt title in the UK. As I write it has 23 reviews, 22 of them 5-star, including one that reads:
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​“Not John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War — better.”

If you're already one of the readers who bought, downloaded, reviewed, or told someone else about Book 1, thank you so very much. You helped me survive the chaos of launch, the disappearing preorders, and the Amazon hurdles. You kept Return to the Galaxy alive.

And now, I have two more pieces of news:

Book 2 is now available to preorder

It’s called Reach for the Galaxy, and it’s just $2.99. it launches on the 29th of July. If you loved Ewan, Jera, Velal or Beryn, I can promise you this, their journey is just beginning. The world opens up, the stakes get higher, and we dive even deeper into the heart of the war.

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Book 1 is free for three days only

From July 1st to July 3rd, Return to the Galaxy will be completely free to download. It will also be fully available in Kindle Unlimited, as always. So, if you’ve sat on the fence until this point, what are you waiting for?

I can only do this for five days every ninety, and not during a launch week, so this chance won’t reappear until probably September.

This is your chance to help others discover the series. Share it. Gift it. Tell a friend who loves sci-fi or just needs a good escape. Every one of those small nudges is a kindness I’ll never forget.

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Get Return to the Galaxy free July 1–3:

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To celebrate, I’d love to share something with you.

In Reach for the Galaxy, the story travels from deep space to Earth and back again, sometimes in beauty, sometimes in chaos.

In one chapter set on Earth, a woman long thought broken reclaims her place in the world.

In another set in deep space, an evacuation spirals into a catastrophe that nearly costs everything.

Together, these scenes became known among my early readers as:

Sleeping Beauty and the Rescue from Hell

These are scenes in the book I’ve been waiting to share for over a year.
Now, I finally can. And you can have an advance read right here.

Thank you for standing with me on this journey. For reading. For dreaming. For helping bring this series to life.

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With gratitude,
​BA Gillies​
Author of Return to the Galaxy​
Publisher, Kyaworks

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​​ “The book grabbed my attention immediately and I was totally immersed in it. Great characters and world building, and a believable storyline. Can't wait for the next book!”

Judith J on Amazon.com

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The Rescue From Hell | Velal | Janest System​
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My fleet was now the last in the system. We’d remained only because we wanted to finish stripping the Chanor dockyard.

But I couldn’t relax. Not while Janest still shuddered through its last gasping breaths beneath the gas giant’s horizon.

I looked in on Atha. She was sleeping, looking pale and exhausted. I admired her bravery and her determination to save as many people as possible. I’d told her it was too dangerous for a fleet to remain over Janest because the hibernation carriers would be too slow if the Ranid returned. I still stood by that decision, but her determination to help was making me second-guess myself.

We’d already saved millions, yet it wasn’t enough. We’d done what we could to save extra people by filling our ships to their limits, and we had in-system drive craft acting like lifeboats lashed to every available surface. But I couldn’t stop thinking of the millions still trapped below. Now, I saw a chance to do more. If I was willing to gamble.

I knew my main duty was to the fleet as a whole, but I thought of Atha's courage and the desperation of the people on the planet below. What if it were my family still trapped there? What would I be willing to risk?

Only a few percent of the population remained, but that was still well over a hundred million people. I knew that if I didn’t try, their fate would haunt me for ever. We couldn’t save them all, but we could save some of them.

So, I made a choice.

I summoned Morin and Vidas. Gave Morin the fleet. Then I called every destroyer and frigate captain to the edge of the dockyard and laid out the plan.

No orders. Just a question. Who’d volunteer?

Every hand went up.

A few hibernation carriers still floated in the system under AI control, abandoned now that Admiral Vern and Senas were no longer with us. I ordered four to join my fleet, along with another dozen freighters.

I told two more mid system hibernation carriers to head straight for Janest, along with two of the empty freighters.

I wouldn’t risk the fleet at Janest, but it was relatively safe at Chanor. No Bug fleet could jump into the system so close to a gas giant.

If we were unlucky and got trapped over Janest, Morin could take the fleet away while the rest of us scattered and scrambled for the hyper limit.

I was willing to risk the faster destroyers and frigates. The empty hibernation carriers and freighters I had sent directly to Janest would have to take their chances. Refugees they loaded would have a chance to escape. Anyone left on the planet would die for sure when the Ranid obliterated it.

We had six destroyers, eight frigates, fast freighters that could do two runs if they survived, slow freighters good for only one, and an unfinished starcarrier that JJ had somehow coaxed into functioning. No weapons. No shields. But she had breathable air, running water, and a little gravity. It would have to be enough.

I stared at the assembled group, more rust bucket convoy than war fleet. But every ship meant more survivors. Another family saved. Another child not burning to death in the rubble.

My last chance fleet couldn’t save everyone, but it was something. The question was whether I had the courage to roll the dice one last time. I asked myself what Admiral Huris would do.

She would’ve gone.

My decision was easy.

I ordered all of the six fast freighters JJ had at the dockyard to head for Janest straight away. The military ships could overtake them later.

Over the next two hours, we repositioned ships. I attached all the empty surplus shuttles to the sides of the destroyers and frigates, leaving some non-hyperdrive ships floating beside the Chanor dockyard.

We spread two hundred cadets across the destroyers and frigates. They’d done a good job getting the hibernation carriers loaded at the universities. Now, that experience would stand them in good stead as they would have to manage the loading of their adopted ships. They wouldn’t need instruction, just nerves of steel. I wanted to take more cadets, but every extra person we took back to Janest meant one less person we could rescue.

I would have loved to take a large force of Marines, but the fleet was already short. Instead, I asked Captain Surit to send forty with us.

“I’ll go,” he said immediately.

I shook my head. “If I don’t come back, the fleet needs you even more.”

He hesitated, jaw tight. Then nodded once and sent his second-in-command, Kevel Durat, along with forty handpicked Marines. Good men. The best he had.

I took five hundred Anodroids. They would be very useful in the rescue, but ultimately, they could each be sacrificed if it meant saving another person.

As the destroyers spun up their drives, I stood on the command deck watching the hastily assembled flotilla fan out against the stars.

We were about to roll the dice one last time.

And I knew it was going to be ugly.

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The Dam | Velal | Janest System

The planet below glowed in eerie, shifting hues, its cities lit by the fires of panic and looting. I couldn’t believe that when I heard it. I could maybe have understood abandoned people stealing alcohol or drugs for one last despairing blowout, but these were stories of people stealing credit disks and jewelry. That felt like the last spasm of a rotting corpse.

From orbit, Janest looked like a war zone, even though no Ranid troops had set foot there.

My captains knew their destroyers and frigates, so I left them to it and piloted an assault shuttle instead. Once I had a feel for how things were going, I would use it to oversee the evacuation.

We started with some small towns away from where the carriers had picked up students earlier. The shuttles landed, opened their ramps, and filled with fearful, huddled bodies shuffling gratefully aboard, before their flying life rafts lifted into the sky.

We’d filled the fast freighters first and got them on their way. The slow freighters were next, and then we started on the hibernation carriers and the star carrier. The problem was that we weren’t loading people fast enough, so we moved to Venpar, one of the medium-sized cities.

The landing zones were carefully chosen to avoid the worst of the devastation, far from the city centre where looters swarmed like rats. But even here, desperation hung thick in the air. By the time we reached the city, the fast freighters had unloaded their human cargo to the hibernation carriers at Chanor and were on their way back to Janest.

At first, the Venpar evacuations were orderly. Navy cadets managed the queues, voices taut but disciplined. Twenty Marines in power armor formed a tight perimeter. Shuttles cycled in and out, engines whining, vents hissing as they swallowed as many as they could hold. One after another, the frigates climbed, then dropped again. It worked. At first.

The first wave of evacuees had waited, stunned by shock, corralled by hope, their distress muted by exhaustion.

Word spread. Shuttles were landing. People could see them, giant silver birds against the smoke-choked sky, rising and falling, lifting the lucky into the clouds. They represented safety. Hope. A desperate last chance.

That knowledge broke the dam.

The second wave came like a swarm, masses of people pouring into the evacuation zones, their screams rising in a terrible crescendo. The cadets couldn’t hold them back. At the last second, they were recalled inside the Marine perimeter, their shouted commands drowned out by the roar of the crowd.

It began as a ripple at the edge of the landing zones, a tidal surge of people driven by blind panic. The lines broke, and order dissolved into chaos. Families clung together, dragging children forward. The old and the sick were pushed aside. The screams increased. Chaos erupted.

I clenched my fists as I watched through the drone feed. A young woman stumbled and was swallowed by the crowd. A man shoved his way to the front, only to be knocked down and trampled. Another woman screamed as she was dragged away from her child, her arms outstretched, her voice lost in the noise.

Even the bio-enhanced pets sensed danger was approaching. They picked up the emotional flood of fear and desperation and somehow sensed this was the last chance. Dogs darted through the crush, squeezing through legs, barks drowned out by the cries of the hopeless. Cats scrambled over shoulders and heads, their claws digging into anything they could climb to get closer to the shuttles.

I watched through my monitors as chaos unfolded below.

At the base of one ramp, Lieutenant Durat stood with his helmet off, his handsome face calm but firm. He raised his hands, trying to project authority.

“Stay in line!” he shouted loudly, his speaker-magnified voice cutting through the chaos. “We will take as many as we can! Please, hold the line!”

For a moment, the crowd seemed to pause, the weight of his words holding them back. Then, a single shot echoed through the air. Someone had realized he wouldn’t get a place and didn’t want anyone to survive if he couldn’t. The bullet struck Kevel cleanly, just above his right eye. His body stiffened, his arms dropping to his sides as if in slow motion. For an agonizing heartbeat, he stood there, blood trickling down his face. Then he collapsed.

Marines fired warning shots, but it only drove the mob into a frenzy. They surged forward, panic overwhelming any sense of reason. I watched as two Marines were dragged down, bodies swallowed by the crowd. Shuttles were being swarmed, civilians clawing at the ramps, climbing on the hulls, desperate to get inside.

I saw the other Marines start to raise their weapons and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I couldn’t let those young men have murder on their conscience. I tapped my targeting screen and fired.

The assault shuttle’s lasers cut through the largest group, where the shot had come from, vaporizing rows of the mob. The air filled with the acrid stench of burnt flesh, and the screams took on a new pitch, fear mixed with panic.

The crowd that seconds before had been fighting to get onboard desperately scattered, but the damage was done. Kevel was gone, and two of my brave Marines were dead with him.

“Get those shuttles in the air!” I barked into the comms, my voice sharp, clipped. The power-armored Marines held the perimeter as the last of the loaded shuttles lifted off, their ramps closing on overfilled holds. The destroyers and frigates in orbit adjusted to receive the overloaded craft, cramming refugees into every available space.

But there were still more. There were always more.

***

“Target smaller towns again,” I ordered, my voice steady despite the pain in my chest. “Avoid large crowds. Find isolated pockets. We can’t risk more carnage like that.”

The comms were quiet as the orders rippled outward. Destroyers and frigates peeled off, their shuttle bays humming to life again. They swept wide arcs over the ravaged hemisphere, skimming past smoking megastructures and empty monorail lines. From above, they looked like apocalyptic ruins, fires raging unchecked, vehicles abandoned in the streets in spirals of gridlock.

They hadn’t been bombed, but the chaos made them look like war zones. It was easy to see the scattered fire fights, lasers cutting through the smoke. Janest hadn’t waited for the Ranid, it was already eating itself.

The shuttles dived toward the rural outskirts, places still clinging to some semblance of civility, still sane enough to manage queues without bullets.

The shuttles cycled in tight waves. Touch down. Load. Ascend. Again. Again. Every ship ran at maximum endurance, engines hot, hulls scorched from rapid reentry. The fast freighters returned from Chanor, made second runs, and vanished into the clouds again with holds jammed to the bulkheads, forty thousand lives at a time.

The larger slow freighters carried one hundred and forty thousand refugees in a single trip each, their decks transformed into silent cities of the displaced, crammed with bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder. The star carrier, barely functional, managed to take eighty-seven thousand before its environmental systems reached their limit.

The destroyers and frigates took on more, cramming their holds to capacity, pushing well beyond design specs. Each destroyer could carry almost three thousand for the short run to the Chanor Dockyard, while the frigates held a thousand each. Every inch of space was filled. People sat on the floors of corridors, clung to railings, and pressed against bulkheads, their faces hollow with exhaustion, fear, and relief.

My own shuttle was packed beyond capacity, every available space crammed with bodies. I hovered above the landing zone, watching through the monitors as the final survivors were loaded. I managed to find barely enough room on a hibernation carrier to unload.

As the last shuttles left orbit, a distress call came through. An isolated research station on an island had been left behind, its occupants stranded when their floaters failed to arrive. I changed course, descended personally, landing on a deserted island beach.

By the time I reached them, hundreds of scientists and students were gathered at the shoreline, their faces pale, strained with fear, their movements slow. They boarded without argument, without chaos. They carried two cats, which clung to them as if understanding the stakes.

We lifted off, but on the way out of the atmosphere for the last time, I heard a weak distress signal. If I’d chosen a different course by even a couple of degrees, we’d never have noticed.

A large floater drifted at the edge of the atmosphere, unable to go further, its passengers out of air and time. No thrust. No life support. Just a metal shell full of dying people.

We docked and pulled them in, four adults, ten children, and two dogs. The last child to board clutched a tattered stuffed animal, her wide eyes staring at me as I sealed the hatch with trembling hands.

“These people,” I muttered, “have just used up all the luck they’ll ever have.”

We had absolutely no room for them. I made them sit on the floor of the airlock for the whole journey.

***

We’d lost three Marines and eight cadets, but we returned to the Chanor Dockyard with over two million souls plucked from certain death. Refugees crammed into every available space. The freighters were overloaded, their environmental systems straining to keep up.

We hadn’t lost a single Anodroid. In the end, they’d loaded themselves into one of the holds in the starcarrier that was still in a vacuum and stayed there silently for the whole trip back. I’d forgotten that they didn’t need to breathe.

As the last of the ships docked, I allowed myself a moment of relief. We’d done everything we could. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. And I knew the weight of that truth would plague me forever.

That night, in the quiet after the chaos, Vana held me. I didn’t speak. Didn’t try to explain. She just wrapped her arms around me and let me fall apart. I buried my face in her shoulder and cried until sleep came. And still, the faces of the ones we left behind flickered in the dark behind my eyes.

I stood the crew down for twelve hours.

Told myself we’d go back.

But we never did.

And the faces of the millions we’d left behind never stopped following me.

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“I couldn’t put it down. I stayed up to read this and finished it in a night! Such a fantastic book, well written and I really enjoyed the humour. Looking forward to the next book!!”

- KT, Amazon UK

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And now a change of pace. This is…
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Sleeping Beauty | Shona | The Pat Cave | 2039

The room was bright, lights shining at full strength. Shona stood before the full-length mirror, breath tight in her chest. For the first time in decades, she forced herself to examine her tortured body fully.

The ancient face that stared back was a battlefield of scars, a roadmap of the explosion and inferno that had nearly ended her. Her left cheek was a warped mess of ridges, her eyebrow broken by the jagged intrusion of shrapnel.

The worst was her mouth, twisted, uneven, forever caught in the shadow of the blast. She saw the charred holes where her ears had been burnt off in the fire. She looked at the far too many scars on her body where her flesh had run like candle grease.

She exhaled shakily, whispering, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… Who’s the Ugliest of Them All?"

The mirror had no answer. It didn’t need one. She knew it was her.

She couldn’t help it. She sobbed quietly. Bitter tears for the vibrant young woman lost all those years ago.

She remembered all the wasted decades, hiding from the light, away from everyone but a few very close friends like Gwyn. All the pain, the missed opportunities, the deep soul-crushing years of loneliness.

She clenched her fists. Enough. She'd lived with this wreckage long enough. It was time.

Time to be reborn.

Shona turned, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes.

“Do it, Jera.”

***

The Best Things In Life | Shona | Oxford | 2039

Three weeks after Shona’s regeneration, Oxford was alive around her, bustling cafés, students hurrying down cobbled streets, the crisp scents in the air, the smell of newly baked hot cross buns in the Easter sunshine.

She was walking up a hill near the city center. Shona barely noticed the gradient. Every step was effortless, every movement filled with a vitality she'd never known.

She caught sight of herself in a glass storefront,

And stopped cold.

Her reflection was radiant. Clear, smooth skin, sharp cheekbones, and eyes that burned with energy, not just healed, not just whole, but transformed. Deeply, vibrantly alive.

A thrill ran through her as she turned, her step light, almost a dance. Across the street, two university students sitting in a café fell silent as she passed, one nudging the other. A man talking intently on his phone looked up, halting mid-step, his gaze lingering.

For the first time in forever, she wasn’t shunned, she wasn’t hiding, and she wasn’t invisible in her scarves, big hats, and shrouding clothing.

For the first time in decades, she wanted people to look at her, stare at her, desire her, and she loved it.

No.

Much more.

She gloried in it.

Seeing the admiration in their eyes. The need. The hunger.

And it could be this way forever.

She pirouetted, twirled, swayed her hips, drifting gracefully, dancing a few steps from a song she remembered from so long ago.

She couldn’t help the chuckling laugh that bubbled all the way from her stomach.

On a whim, she stopped, reversed her path and walked back down to the café.

She floated gracefully to the table with the two young students, pulled out a chair with easy grace and settled into it.

She put her elbows on the table, fingers interlocked. She lightly rested her chin on her fingers, tilted her head to the side and gave them her most dazzling smile. “Hi, I’m Shona.”

They gazed back adoringly.

Every cell in her body fizzed with joy.

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Return to the Galaxy and Reach for the Galaxy are available now:

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Preordering helps the book appear higher in the charts on launch day.

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Thank you for everything.
​BA Gillies

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Discover More Free Sci-Fi Adventures

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