Tag: military science fiction

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Author C.J. Henderson

Published on by Bryan1 Comment

If you don’t know who he is, you probably should. CJ Henderson’s story have appeared in two of the previous Full Throttle Space Tales anthologies. He’s Author Guest Of Honor alongside Cheri Priest at MileHiCon this Fall in Denver, and he’s authored seventy novels, including five novel series: Jack Hagee, Piers Knight, Teddy London, Blakely & Boles, and Dragonlord. And his numerous Rocky and Noodles short stories are just a small part of his story collection. The recipient of Honorable Mention in the 1997 Best Horror Of The Year edited by Ellen Datlow, and Best Newcomer Of The Year from the Academy of SF, Fantasy and Horror Motion Pictures, his short stories and nonfiction have appeared in  countless venues. He’s a regular contributor to the SFWA Bulletin. He can be found online at http://cjhenderson.com. His Space Battles story “Space Battle Of The Bands” continues characters and setting from other FTST stories and his Rocky and Noodles stories.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

CJ Henderson: I got the invitation because I’d already been in “Space Pirates” and “Space Horrors.” What made me submit was that it was another opportunity for me to do a story with my continuing crew, the wacky boys and girls of the E.A.S. Roosevelt.

BTS: Tell us a little about “Space Battle Of The Bands.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

CJH: “Battle” is the sixth story I’ve done in the Rocky & Noodles series. It all started with “Shore Leave,” the first story I did for the Defending the Future, sci fi military series. They wanted me to be a part of their launch volume, “Breech the Hull.” I knew everyone involved (editor, publisher, etc), but was hesitant because I’d never done a sci fi military story before. But, finally I struck on the idea that no one said it had to be hard science, and grim battlefield blood letting. So, I wrote a story much more like a 1940’s MGM musical about two gobs on leave … just on leave on another world. It went over very well.

Then, before I knew it, Space Pirates came along, asking for a story. Well, I had felt I’d dodged a bullet, coming up with a way to be in the DtF series without doing a typical sci fi military story. And really had no thoughts of ever doing another. But, I’d had the phrase “space pirate cookies” stuck in my head for 30 years (honest) because of some silliness carried out with some pals … and it just got me skimming along. I wrote my second story in this universe, with the title “Space Pirate Cookies,” and suddenly had a second sci fi military musical comedy with no trouble, and that was kind of it. Before I knew it, I was churning out Rocky & Noodles tales for both DtF and Full Throttle on a regular basis.

For Space Horrors I did “Oh Why, Can’t I?” which was a real send-up of some of the cliche’s created by Classic Trek. Now, when Space Battles came along, the phrase “Space Battle of the Bands” popped into my head, and I was off and running again. This one didn’t have songs in it, but it was musically inclined, so I figured it was close enough. And, the characters have grown to the point where now some of the stories aren’t even musical at all. But, they’re still funny (at least, the fans say they are), so I figure I’m okay. It’s the comedy that seems to have kept people coming back for more, tracking down the other books, et cetera.

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

CJH: I started out telling stories to the other kids at night under the street light. In the 8th grade, someone said, “You ought to write stuff down,” and I did. Then, after doing 100s of stories over the next few years, when I got out of college, someone said, “You ought to send stuff out,” so I did. And that’s how it got started. Good thing I’m suggestible, or maybe nothing would have ever happened.

BTS: You’ve had quite a number of stories and novels published. Is writing your full time career?

CJH: Yeah, pretty much. There are 70 books on the shelves, hundreds and hundreds of short stories and comics published, and thousands of non-fiction pieces. So, this is what I do.

BTS: Tell us about some of your other work?

CJH: There’s so much. I mostly known these days for doing supernatural investigators. My Teddy London series (9 books) is coming back into print for the third time right now. He was my first occult detective. I’m currently working on the third book in the Piers Knight series. He’s my newest guy. He’s a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, and battles menaces from beyond with the artifacts stored in the museum.  There are other supernatural detectives, but there’s also my non-supernatural P.I., Jack Hagee. And Dragonlord, my sword and sorcery series. And Lai Wan, who is a character from the London series who got popular enough to get her own stories and comics. And Blakley & Boles, my college professors that routinely get involved with the supernatural. And my two steampunk series, and Masters of Tarot, and my continuation of “Kolchak: the Nightstalker” for Moonstone, and well … you get the idea.

I get bored working on just one series, or even one kind of story, so I find I’m always shaking things up. It just helps keep me fresh.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe? A novel perhaps?

CJH: Not a novel, but Mike McPhail, the editor from DtF, who inspired the whole Rocky & Noodles thing in the first place, is keen on collecting all the stories and putting out one big book. I’ve already written some material that will go in the front to kind of set things up, and then in go all the stories. There’s already a large enough word count to almost fill a book, so what I’m working on in my spare time is a novella that will cap the book off, tie everything together, and give it a novel-like feel in the end. I’ve done this several times before. I like to give my characters a sense of closure so fans don’t feel disappointed when stories stop coming out about this or that group. That way I can always go back later, but if I don’t, people don’t get upset.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

CJH: Well, I’m waiting for the first Masters of Tarot novel to come out right now, as well as the new “Kolchak in the Lost World,” and “The Shadow of Evil,” which is a pulp-action-adventure novel, the first new novel for the character The Spider in 65 years. He was as big as Doc Savage and the Shadow back in the day, and they have me writing a series of new adventures for him. There’s Radio City Knight, the 3rd Piers Knight novel which I’m finishing right now, and …You know, I don’t want to drive folks crazy. Just tell them to go over to www.cjhenderson.com, and check things out. There’s info about what I’m up to, and free short stories to read … oh, and if they’ve read any of my previous Full Throttle stories (or, well, anything of mine) there’s also that “Contact Us” spot. I’d love to chat with anyone who wants to tell me what they think of my stuff. I’ve got my fingers crossed that “Space Battle of the Bands” will be a crowd pleaser like the rest of the stories have been, but … well … you know, the public is in charge of that.

So, without further adieu, here’s an excerpt from “Space Battle Of The Bands”:

Space Battle of the Bands

C.J. Henderson

“Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, to bend a knotted oak.” ―William Congreve

“Now ya gotta admit, Noodles, that was really something cool.” The speaker was Chief Gunnery Officer Rockland Vespucci, and on a casual, or even close inspection it would have to be admitted by most anybody that he indeed had a point. Machinist First Mate Li Qui Kon, the person to whom he had been making his point, did not answer. At least not at first, which was also perfectly understandable. What they were seeing before them was a sight not oft seen by anyone.

“Rocky,” the gunnery officer’s friend said finally, his voice a whisper as had been his companion’s, “I see those understatement seminars the captain insisted you attend really have done the trick.”

As members of the crew of the E.A.S. Roosevelt, the pair of swabbies had witnessed many of the most inspiring, dreadful, and even down-right goofy things the galaxy had to offer. It was a rare moment, however, when they managed to see something that combined all three emotions so completely as the one they were sharing at that moment. The Roosevelt, as the most advanced of all Earth’s warships, was often times sent into situations merely to allow its admittedly awesome presence to be observed by others not in possession of such a presence. That particular segment of current reality in the ship’s already grand history was another one of those times.

At present, the Roosevelt and her crew were on display in the Belthis System. More specifically, they were in orbit around Belthis Prime,
one of the newest candidates for entry into the grand Confederation of
Planets, of which the Earth was the big cheese. The Roosevelt was the
ship responsible for exposing the Pan-Galactic League of Suns—the
galaxy’s former big cheeses—as somewhat of a fraud when it came to
ruling the universe. Thus the ship had earned itself the job, desired or
not, of being present at every official Confederation Entrance Ceremony
that the Confederation could manage.

At this particular ceremony, those members of the crew not on
duty were pressed up against the ship’s various view ports, or at least
crowding around a monitor with an external feed, watching as the
Belthin Navy put on a display of their weaponry. The demonstration
was part fireworks show, part how-do-you-like-them-apples, but it
was, nonetheless, most effective.

Out beyond one of Belthis’ third moon, a wide range of target
vessels had been arrayed for systematic destruction, and so far it had
been in the parlance of the average fellow, “a hell of a show.” The
Belthin ships were knocking off their objectives one after another with
an array of light beams which lit the ebony of space with a astounding
splash of interwoven colors, and something else the crew of the
Roosevelt could not quite believe.

Sound.

Yes, of course, they were all aware that sound could not travel in
a vacuum. Travel? It could not even exist. And yet, somehow the destructive
rays were slathering the area with not only color, but for lack
of a better word, music, as well.

It seemed that Belthin science had, over the centuries, developed
a defensive/offensive capability unknown anywhere else in the galaxy.
And, on the Roosevelt’s forward bridge, it was that very factor which was
the topic of conversation between the ship’s captain, Alexander Benjamin
Valance, her science officer, Mac Michaels, and a rather average looking
Belthin, DixWix Plemp, Supreme Defulator for the Regime.

“You like our ships, yes? Impressive in their furious manner, are
they not, hum? Magnificent in their ferocious demeanor, no?”

“Absolutely,” answered Valance, only being partially diplomatic
by praising the event, “it is, I must admit, one of the most outstanding
military displays I’ve ever had the privilege to witness.”

“I have to agree,” said Michaels, the all-around big-brained whiz
kid of the Roosevelt. “This branch of defensive weaponry you folks
have created has to be singularly unique in all the cosmos. I mean, I’ve
certainly never heard of anything even remotely like it.”

“It is very impressive,” added the captain. And, to be fair, he was
not just doing so to keep the oddly-shaped alien smiling. In fact, the
human contingent actually had no way of knowing if their current
could hosts could smile. The Belthins were basically a race of beings
that resembled nothing else more than a stack of meat pancakes. They
did not possess heads, persay, but heard and saw and spoke through
a variety of slits located around the summit of their conical bodies.
Their means of locomotion consisted of puckering their rounded base
and then moving by tilting themselves back and forth as they wobbled
along. Needless to say, the Belthins did not believe in stairs.

Most of them fell within the range of three to four feet tall with
few exceptions. They were also quite a symmetrical race, the majority
of them being almost exactly equal in their diameter to their height.
Indeed, the ship’s utility crew had been called upon to construct a
platform affair for the Supreme Defulator to perch upon so he might
be able to view the display along with Valance and Michaels as more
of an equal—and without looking so much like some manner of pet
waiting for one of them to take for a walk.

“Can you tell us anything about these systems, Defulator Plemp,”
asked Michaels in a clearly admiring tone. “Not looking to cart off
your secrets, of course, but … oh, seriously … how did your people
stumbled across such an astounding technology, or was it a conscious
search? And, how long ago did they do so … or was it was it merely a
lucky stumble? Did some Belthin visionary actually set out to unravel
such secrets, I mean…”

Plemp formed a hand-and-arm-like appendage with a thought,
extending it in a casual manner, gesturing with an impressively fluid
bow that he would be most happy to answer such questions. The
Defulator was not worried about revealing any of his people’s secrets.
As he explained, he was not scientist or even mechanic enough to give
away any important points about their defenses. He was, however, a
politician through and through, one dedicated to getting his race into
the Confederation of Planets and thus ready to brag about anything
Belthinian at a moment’s notice.

“We Belthins are quite ready, willing as well, to discuss such things,
yes? All our weapons have been developed, constructed, designed upon
these lines over our centuries, hum? You understand, no?”

“You’re telling me,” asked Michaels, more excited than ever,
“you have in-atmosphere weapons which work using this same basic
technology?”

“All Belthin weapons work thus, you see? You follow? From the
slightest personal protector, to our deluxe line of planet smashers …
yes? All are music to the ears, no?”

Valance and his science officer did not hesitate to agree. The Belthin
weapons were extraordinary, both in that they possessed devastating
power, and yet did not use very much energy at all to create their devastation.
And, unlike the old style nuclear weapons of Earth, they were an
utterly clean source of destruction which left no undesirable residues or
contaminants behind.

“Very long time we possess these principles, yes? But, to use in
space, new this is for us, you understand? You follow? Did not need—
did not know there was need, did not suspect, hum? You are with us,
no? You—”

“Captain,” interrupted Lieutenant Drew Cass, the weapons officer
on duty, “we’ve got three unknowns approaching the display sector.
Running silent.”

“Confirming silence is intentional, sir,” added Iris Feng, the
communications officer, “identical requests sent out in Earth 9.8,
Belthin, and Pan-Galactic—no response.”

“Defulator Plemp,” asked Valance, “any idea whose ships those
are?” Puckering violently, swelling to his full extension of some four
feet, three inches, the supreme ruler of Belthin shouted;
“These are known, yes! Enemies! Hostiles, you understand? You
know? You—”

And then, the weapons fire began, and the darkness of space
exploded in flame.

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here.

 

 

 

 

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Author Sarah Hendrix

Published on by Bryan1 Comment

“The Gammi Expriment,” Sarah Hendrix’s Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 story was her third anthology sale but wound up being her first SF story published.  She does a little bit of everything from publicist work for Apex Publications to slush reading for Dagan Books and co-hosting #sffwrtcht on Twitter. She staves off insanity by untangling her kitten from yarn and working with tiny beads. Despite her heavy workload, she still finds time to write and edit her own stories and game with her fiancé. Her stories can be found in the In Situ and FISH anthologies, both from Dagan Books. You can follow her on her blog at http://shadowflame1974.wordpress.com.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

Sarah Hendrix: You invited me to submit,

BTS: Oh yeah, I forgot. *winks* This is your first SF sale, correct? Tell us a little about “The Gammi Experiment.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

SH: First space themed sale. The other two sales are SF related. When I was first invited to the anthology I tossed around several ideas, but they weren’t going anywhere.  Then one evening I was listening to my fiance play EVE Online. His corp was getting ready to fight a battle. They were discussing the advantage of small ships doing bombing runs. It got me to thinking.  Where would smaller ships have the advantage over a large fleet?  What kind of people would have these ships? Why would they want to fight if they were so outnumbered.  The ideas for “The Gammi Experiment” was born though it took a few drafts to hammer everything out.

“The Gammi Experiment” is about a former Federation pilot who is asked to be a liaison between some hard headed space miners and a General who desperately needs their assistance against the Ukra pirates.

BTS: You’ve had other stories published. Tell us about those.

SH: I have two other sold stories: “Rachel’s Journal” will be in the upcomming In Situ anthology from Dagan Books. The anthology features artifacts found on other worlds. “Rachel’s Journal” is a story about a dying world. “Never to Return” will be in the FISH anthology, again from Dagan Books. In this book, a girl goes to visit her grandmother. She assists with a team of scientists trying to bring stability back to our poisoned world.

BTS: You also are involved with SFFWRTCHT and do an Urban Fantasy Column, Edge Of The City. Tell us about those please.

SH: I got involved with #SFFWRTCHT in its beginning. I had already been participating in #UFChat and we’re friends. Hopefully, my suggestions at the very beginning have helped the #sffwrtcht gain a following and become as large as it is now. Once  the #sffwrtcht blog, I volunteered to do some posts. One of my favorite sub-genres is Urban Fantasy so it was natural to want to do those. I feel that UF has a very broad range of readers and potential story lines.  I mean, where else can you get action, adventure, a bit of romance, self reflection, character development and kick (tail) story lines?

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

SH: I’ve been writing since I was young. I still have my very first story I wrote in 1st grade. My first stories were of course FanFiction, but I don’t think anyone saw those. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I decided to get serious. I’ve still got a way to go, but enjoying it every step of the way.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this story’s universe?

SH: Actually I do, the Gammi universe deserves some exploration and I intend on doing that sometime.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

SH: Well, right now, I’ve got a lot of work to do with the stories I have.  After taking some great classes with Cat Rambo, I’ve got a better idea of where I need work.  It’s going to take some time, but I’ll have more out there in the world soon. *grin*

Here’s an excerpt from “The Gammi Experiment”:

The Gammi Experiment

Sarah Hendrix

As he reached the door of the General’s office, Naz Othran straightened his flightsuit. It was general distribution, grey and didn’t fit well around his shoulders. He would have preferred the worn jumpsuit he used on his own ship, but General Akinda insisted that all the pilots wear what her crews wore. He ran a hand through his dark hair acutely aware that it was longer than normal and wished he had enough time for a quick shower. After nearly fifteen years, he never thought he would be flying under an actual commander again. Not after the court-martial even if he had been acquitted of all charges. After his discharge, he’d thought Gammi Sector would be a good place to make a new life, to hide what he had once been. It was an outlying system, out of the way, and no one asked questions so long as he completed the jobs he was hired to do. He paused a moment outside the door, feeling he was going to be asked to do the impossible.

He stepped through the door and closed it, standing at attention before the older woman behind the desk. “You wanted to see me?” Even though he wasn’t a part of the Federation Fleet he knew about General Akinda. One of the few females to make it through the harshest officer training and command a battle fleet, her face was featured on the news vids often enough for her to be recognizable.

She didn’t look at him as she paced in the shadows. “Seven fights in the past two days. Hard headed, sub-space idiots the lot of ’em.”

Unsure if she was speaking to herself or to him, Naz remained silent.

She paused and spun on her heels. Her wrinkled face was furrowed into a tight frown, making it seem much older than her sixty years. “This isn’t working. I can’t make miners into battleship captains in a few weeks. No one can.” She waited for Naz to reply as she glared at him.

Finally he shook his head. “They aren’t Academy recruits, sir. They aren’t disciplined.” Before he’d left the core system, he hadn’t heard of Akinda often but, in those fifteen years, he hadn’t thought much about the Federation fleet except for the war against the Ukra pirates. When her ships arrived in system, he’d done a bit of research and was pleased to find she was at least a competent commander. Tough but in his opinion fair. Still even the best commanders made mistakes.

Akinda sighed and moved to her desk. In the brighter light, her skin was darker than he expected and the streaks of grey hair more pronounced. Naz had a touch of nostalgia as he remembered his grandmother. Akinda shared the same skin tone, a warm brown with a slight build. He almost chuckled at the thought of comparing the two women. One kindly and soft, the other hard and demanding. But even his grandmother had a streak of stubbornness that could not be denied.

“I know that.” Her answer startled him. She sounded tired, defeated, though the fight hadn’t even started. Sitting on the high back chair, she picked up a small stack of papers. “I’ve looked over your file. You were quite a pilot once.”

He couldn’t stop the flinch in his shoulders. “I’m still a pilot.”

Her eyes flicked up to him then back down. “Captain Othran, I’ll be frank. We don’t have a lot of time. The Ukra fleet will probably arrive here in this sector within the next few lunar cycles. And without some sort of defense, all of those hard headed sub-space idiots out there are going to be slaved to their ships until the ores are played out or they burn up.”

His lips pressed harder together with every word the General said. “In the past three weeks, I can’t get anything resembling a squad together let alone a fleet. They agreed,” she paused and pointed at him, “you agreed, to work with us. Yet all I’ve had is trouble.”

“It isn’t like we had much of a choice.” The snarl escaped before he could hold it back.

Akinda’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say Captain?”

He slowly released the fists he had clenched. “You come into the system unannounced, claiming that the Ukra are coming here. You claim we can’t stand against those pirates. They’ve ignored us until now, at least until we opened the Adrian belts. And if it weren’t for the Utobian you wouldn’t be here either.”

“The Federation protects…”

Naz slammed his hand down on the table. “The Federation protects only what it has to. Akinda, you aren’t talking to one of those sub-space idiots here. I spent most of my life in the Academy and in the Federal Fleet. I saw what your Federation protects and doesn’t protect.”

Before she could protest, he continued. “The Ukra build ships faster than the Federation. For every ship taken out, the Ukra supply three more. I’m not stupid and neither are most of those pilots out there. You didn’t just come here to protect the Utobian; you came here to make a point.”

Akinda slowly leaned back and crossed her arms. “What makes you think that, Captain?”

“Why else would you bring in equipment and supplies to refit our ships?”

“Have a seat Othran.” She gestured to the chair opposite her. As soon as he was comfortable, she leaned forward. “You’re right, the Federation doesn’t have enough ships to defend this or any other outlying sector. However we can’t let the Ukra fly in where it wants and take resources. If we don’t have enough ships, we’ll have to find them somewhere. The best option is to use what’s here. Your mining ships. The Federation sends you the equipment and gives the sectors some training. And we are paying you well.”

He couldn’t argue, seven hundred Federal credits a day was a better rate than a day’s haul in the belts. Safer too, at least until the Ukra showed up. “The Council agreed?”

She tried to avoid his gaze. “Let’s just say you are the first experiment. If it works out well, we’ll leave you the equipment, station, and a few ships here in the sector to protect it on your own.”

He knew how the Council worked. Unofficial tests held in out of the way corners gave enough feedback for the Council to make a definite decision. Naz Othran nodded. “How long until they reach us?”

She shrugged. “Another full lunar cycle at least. Maybe more. Since there are no available warp gates, we will know before they reach the system. The Ukra will have to rely on their subspace drives to travel this far. We should have a few days’ warning before they arrive.”

Nervous, he ran a hand through his hair. “It’s not enough time.”

“Captain, it’s all we have. That’s why I need your help.”

“My help, General?”

Akinda leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. “You know these people, their ships, this system. There isn’t enough on the uplinks for us to even guess about how the asteroid belts flow. Our ships cannot use short distance warps, they’re too large. But your ships can, and do. I want to make use of that advantage. I’ve wasted enough time trying to train them. The ships are almost ready. We need to be flying drills, not sitting in simulations. You’re the only pilot here with officer training. My crews like you. I want you to serve as liaison between my
fleet and the Gammi pilots.”

Naz shook his head. “You read my file?”

The General nodded. “I don’t care about that court-marshal. In fact, I think your commanding officer was a fool to order you to fly against those ships. You saved lives, Captain.”

“I’m not going back.”

Akinda shook her head. “I don’t need you as a member of my fleet. I need you to help me train these pilots so we can break the Ukra.”

He was silent for a very long time. Leaning against the chair, he arched his back and looked at the ceiling. “Don’t treat them like recruits.” He shook his head as he leaned forward again. “The miners pride themselves on being able to work alone. Break them up into smaller groups. Make them compete.”

Akinda nodded as she listened.

***
The sirens didn’t even make her jump anymore. Once the lights began to flash and the howling started, Akinda simply dropped what she was doing like every other pilot and made her way to the ship. Things were more organized now; pilots and crews broken up into squads. With Captain Othran’s help, she’d chosen five pilots to serve as alphas for each squad. Fewer fights, fewer complaints, even if it meant she had less control.

Her ship wasn’t the first out, so she took just a bit longer getting into the command seat. “Everything ready?” she asked her crew.

Her second gave her the all clear signal.

She motioned to her captain. “Rendezvous point.”

In moments they were sliding through space at warp toward where the rest of her fleet waited. She switched comms as soon as they came within range.

“They’ve been training on the sims, but let’s see how this goes,” she said to the captains of her regular fleet, then listened as various affirmatives answered her.

She was taking a huge risk by having the Gammi fleet practice with the few ships that had been able to keep up with her command vessel. The rest of her fleet—slower, larger ships— would arrive behind the Ukra fleet, days perhaps even weeks. Half of the Federation Council felt this was a joke and a waste of time, but the other half saw the need to protect the valuable resources here. If she lost any ships, even the half-rusted frigates the Gammi pilots flew, it would be one less ship in the air.

But she didn’t see any other option. Sims weren’t enough. The pilots needed real-time practice in their own ships.

As the ships in her own fleet moved into a typical Ukra formation, she watched the local scan carefully. It didn’t take long for the first blip to appear.

“Mouser on scan, sir,” her navigator reported.

Akinda nodded as the fast moving ship sped in their direction before suddenly darting off into the asteroid belt nearby. Hopefully the Ukra would think the Mouser was a lone ship out on patrol, not a scout sending coordinates back to a fleet. As the three-man ship disappeared from the scans, her screen blipped indicating her fleet was in place.

“Remember, only light pulses, no weapons. We want to give them a taste of what this fight is going to be like, not scare them into the next cycle.”

Her fleet had seen the Ukra fleet up close more than once and knew the basic attack formation by heart—command ships in the center of the fleet, battleships to the front and sides, tech and repair ships to the rear. As the battleships received damage, they would fall back, allowing fresh, undamaged ships to the fore. It was that constant cascade of relatively undamaged ships that made the Ukra fleets so difficult to defeat. Using standard tactics, she’d never be able to hold them off for more than a few minutes with the half fleet she had.

The Gammi ships had the advantage in the scenario she wanted to fight. Able to warp short distances, the miner’s fleet could assemble just out of sensor range and jump into the battle at any time. Because of their smaller size, they were more maneuverable and able to make quick attacks before warping out of range again.

“Five ships on scan,” her navigator said interrupting her thoughts.

“All ships, full shields,” she commanded, hoping to at least save her fleet ships from damage if anything went wrong.

“Yes, General.”

She felt the faint vibration as the shield generators came up to full power. The blips on the screen scattered and disappeared. Leaning forward, she watched carefully as the local scan remained clear. Her heart beat, counting time.

“We have torpedoes on the starboard side,” one of her battleship commanders reported from the front of the formation.

“Hold steady,” she replied as the torpedoes, light pulses, sped towards the battleships. Two more salvos appeared on the scans before the ships uncloaked and warped away.

Told to react like a Ukra fleet, the head battleship began maneuvering to align with where the five ships first came out of warp. The light pulses exploded harmlessly against three of the frontmost ships of the formation.

Working quickly, she signaled those three ships. “React as though you have been neuted.” In battle, the Gammi ships would be carrying torpedoes that carried electrical charges. The ships in range of the blast would at least be temporarily crippled as electrical systems such as navigation and weapons went off line. If they got lucky, there would be one less Ukra ship to worry about.

Not waiting for a reply, she watched on her vidscreen as the three crippled ships started to drift. Expecting the next wave of ships to warp in at the same point the rest of the fleet turned away from the drifting battleships. Her ships attempted to align to the coordinates from which the Gammi ships warped in, as the disabled ships drifted, causing confusion.

Akinda knew the Ukra counted on the repeated actions of the Academy trained pilots. Many of the fleet commanders had less imagination than her pinky finger. It was no wonder the Ukra had decimated ship numbers greater than their own. But the more she studied their actions, the more convinced she became that even the Ukra had become complacent.

Her fleet completed maneuvers, aligning to the proper coordinates.

Pulse engines engaged, they began to close the distance.

“Port side, incoming!” another ship relayed moments before five more blasts hit several of the ships.

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here.

Write Tip: 7 Things I Learned About Working With Editors From Editing SPACE BATTLES

Published on by Bryan12 Comments

In Spring 2010, I got the chance to pitch publisher David Rozansky of Flying Pen Press some anthology ideas I’d been developing and wound up hired to edit the next installment in the publisher’s long running Full Throttle Space Tales anthology series, Space Battles, which release last week, April 18. After three years now of significant work editing books, stories and now an anthology with authors, I can tell you I have come to the conclusion every writer ought to get experience being an editor. There’s so much helpful stuff to learn but this was particularly true from editing an anthology. Here’s 7 things I learned:

1 ) Meet Deadlines — As an editor, there’s nothing worse than sitting around waiting on writers. If you set a deadline, particularly as I did, many months out for your project, and hardly any stories come in by deadline, you start to worry. I had invited 37 people and needed 17-19 stories, and I had 6 come in by deadline. Unsurprisingly, two of those were by my headliners Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen and Jean Johnson. There’s a reason Mike Resnick gets so many awards and has such a body of work: he’s a pleasure to work with. He’s a professional. He’s reliable. You never appreciate that more than when you’re editing something like this.

2 ) Be Courteous — I invited you to submit to my anthology, in many cases because you’re friends or I like your work. Some of you expressed an interest beforehand and I honored that. Okay, then how come I can name at least 10 “friends” I’ve never heard from since? They didn’t thank me for the original invite. They didn’t respond to the reminders as deadline approach. Not a word after the post-deadline pleas for more stories. I have heard nothing. How do you think that makes me feel about their professionalism and their friendship? How likely do you think I’ll be to invite them to my next project? I leave it to you to figure that out but I’d bet it’s pretty obvious after what I said about Resnick. Resnick’s already invited to my next project.

3 ) Work With Me — Editors edit. It’s what we’re employed to do. My job is to help both your story and the anthology as a whole be the best it can be. I want us all to win. I don’t want to ruin your story, so don’t be difficult. Yeah, I’m not perfect. I don’t know everything. But neither do you. When I ask for changes, I expect you to discuss it yes, but I also expect you to make the changes. If there’s something you feel strongly about, I am fair. We can discuss it. But don’t make me do it for you from stubbornness and don’t nitpick every single minor change. I had some authors who asked to keep a couple things for various reasons and I agreed because they willingly made every other change I asked for. I didn’t ask for a lot. I hate asking people to change their precious words. But sometimes it’s necessary for good reasons. One of my authors wrote enough backstory to fill several novels and his story dragged and suffered for it. He refused to make changes, even after I went through and marked stuff out for him. Most editors would have just rejected it, but I went the extra mile. I wanted to help him make it work. Then this same author kept bragging about how this was “the most brilliant story” I’d gotten of all of them. I passed. And I won’t be inviting him to future projects. I asked for a couple tweaks in Resnick & Torgersen’s story and had it back in less than 24 hours. Who would you rather work with?

4 ) Editors Want Your Story To Be Good — Not only is hard to ask writers to change their precious words, but it’s really hard to reject their stories. It broke my heart. The first story Jean Johnson subbed, I rejected. It didn’t have a core ship on ship battle in space. I did the same with trunk stories from Jay Lake, Kevin J. Anderson and Chuck Gannon. The stories were all brilliant. I’m sure they will find homes. They just didn’t fit the guidelines for this. Yes, I couldn’t believe I was rejecting stories from such talented people. But then I also rejected a couple off sub-par stories as well. And one of them was by a good friend. That was really hard. It hurt me to say it. I didn’t want to be another rejection for any writer. We get enough. I wanted their stories to be good. I wanted them all to be ready and right for the anthology. They weren’t. Thank God I chose not to do an open call. Imagine how many more painful rejections I’d have had to make? As it was, at least I could personalize and praise the good along with saying “no.” And although I know I did the right thing by saying “no,” I still wish I could have said “Yes!”

5 ) Editors Have Deadlines Too — Yeah, I set a deadline for story subs, but you know what, your missing that deadline creates issues with my deadlines for having stories picked and submitting a manuscript to the publisher. I actually had to push it back waiting for stories. How does that make me look professionally? Oh, the publisher was gracious. He understood. But if you continually put me in a spot where I can’t meet deadlines, how likely am I to want to work with you in the future?

6 ) Editors Work Hard — I don’t think you realize how much work it takes to edit until you do it. I’m not talking revision passes on your manuscript. I’m talking editing someone else’s precious work so that it comes out shiny and make everyone get the praise they deserve. It needs to not just fit with the stories around it and flow well, but you need to polish it for typos, get their name right, format it, polish it. It takes a lot of passes reading the stories and it takes a lot of time nitpicking little details. Sadly, I just the other day found a typo in one story near the end of the anthology which I should have caught. I am going to be kicking myself about that forever. I let those writers down. It’s a lot of pressure and work to not just sell the anthology to the publisher, but figure out the best story order, manage the budget wisely, recruit writers, control deadlines, meet deadlines of your own, etc. It takes work to keep fresh eyes rereading the same stories over and over because of all the details. You want to make sure they’re as good as can be and yet you’ve read them so many times it becomes a bit like editing your own work. So writers, don’t think editors have the easy job, because they don’t. And they’re reputations are dependent not just on picking great stories but lots of other factors too.

7) It Feels Just As Good — The sense of pride and accomplishment you get from seeing an anthology you edited published is not that different from that you feel when your novel comes out. It feels really good to help fellow writers achieving career goals even as you achieve your own. It feels really good to know someone finally made it into print with you. It feels good to see them published alongside respected colleagues like Mike Resnick, Jean Johnson, or David Lee Summers. It’s not entirely your own work, gestated for years, pounded through many drafts, yes, because it’s a community effort, but that doesn’t make the success of that any less different. Especially when, having finished, you feel like the writers have become better friends and people you’d welcome working with in the future and who would welcome the opportunity to work with you. And when the publisher asks you ‘what else have you got?’ Boy, that’s a great moment, too. I never looked down on editing as lesser–less of a craft, less significant than writing– but I also never realized how good it could feel to do it and see the end result published professionally. I’ve been proud of the books I edited which got published and were well received, but this pleased me more because I really played a more significant role in its creative design and overall final form by choosing stories, cover, writing intros, bios and the cover copy. It’s a really good feeling and I doubt anyone who takes it on would disagree.

Well, there’s 7 things I learned from editing Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6. What lessons have you learned from editing, working with writers, or editing others? I’d welcome comments. For what it’s worth…

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novels The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, and The Returning, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, the children’s book 102 More Hilarious Dinosaur Jokes For Kids from Delabarre Publishing and editor of the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which he edited for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. As a freelance editor, he’s edited a novels and nonfiction.  An affiliate SFWA member, he also hosts Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat every Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter and is a frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and Hugo nominee SFSignal. He can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via www.bryanthomasschmidt.net.

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Author-Editor-Publisher Grace Bridges

Published on by Bryan2 Comments

Our next author is Grace Bridges whose Space Battles story “Never Look Back” is about two sisters alone on a ship in the aftermath of a battle. In addition to writing, Grace is the editor and publisher of Splashdown Books, a leading Christian speculative fiction publisher in New Zealand. Her novels, Faith Awakened and Legendary Space Pilgrims are out from Splashdown as well as several anthologies. Her  short story serial “Comet Born” is currently ongoing at Digital Dragon Magazine. Grace can be found online via http://www.splashdownbooks.com/, on Facebook, or via her blog at http://blog.splashdownbooks.com/. She’s @gracebridges on Twitter and does occasional book reviews at http://reviews.splashdownbooks.com/.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

Grace Bridges: Well, that would be you, Bryan, who sent me an invite. I had this story I’d written some time before without a particular purpose in mind, and the theme fitted so it was definitely worth a try.

BTS: You’ve had stories in several anthologies, correct? Tell us a little about “Never Look Back.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

GB: I am in a couple of anthologies so far: Underground Rising (ed. Frank Creed) and Forever Friends (ed. Shelagh Watkins) as well as a few where the “sale” happened some time ago, but the books are yet to appear: The Book of Sylvari (ed. Chila Woychik), Year of the Dragon (ed. Randy Streu/T. & J. Ambrose) and The Cross and Cosmos, Year 1 (ed. Glyn Shull/Frank Luke) which are all three due out this year. However, Space Battles was wrapped up the fastest of any – well done! “Never Look Back” was initially my attempt to deal with a very hard time in my life, at a point where I wanted to stay in a particular place, for my own reasons, but had to accept the effect of this on the people around me. So the emotions are very real, although I sent them into space.

BTS: You’ve also had a couple of novels published. Please tell us a little about those.

GB: Faith Awakened (2007): A computer technician gets more than she bargains for when she plunges herself and her companions into virtual reality cryogenic stasis to escape a raging plague. Cyberpunk dystopia, set in a future Ireland. Legendary Space Pilgrims (2010): If Pilgrim’s Progress happened in space, this is what it might look like. A pair of freedom-seekers escape the mind-controlled slavery of Planet Monday and follow the Voice to unknown worlds where wonders and challenges await.

BTS: You also are the publisher of Splashdown Books in New Zealand. Tell us about Splashdown please.

GB: Too many great manuscripts and not enough publishers led to the conclusion that I should use my publishing knowledge for their benefit. It’s been a great ride over the last three years – we now have 19 titles (18 books and one CD) with 8 more coming this year, plus the shared storyworld ezine AvenirEclectia.com. Splashdown has a different workflow to most publishers – our authors join the team and contribute collectively to everyone’s edits, design, marketing and more. You can get a taste of all our authors to the end of 2011 in the group anthology Aquasynthesis (http://www.splashdownbooks.com/anthologies/aquasynthesis).  [A Transcript From a Chat with Grace and Aquasynthesis authors Fred Warren and Rick Copple on SFFWRTCHT can be found here.]

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

GB: I was homeschooled, and one day when I was eight or so, my Dad gave me a one-word story starter and said “go for it!” The word was Zebra… and even then I managed to twist it into a science fiction tale full of planetary colonists and convertible rocketships. Homeschooling for me also meant lots and lots of reading, mostly fiction, adding to my arsenal of words and styles, which has been a huge influence on my writing.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?

GB: Not at this point, but I’m certainly always open to new ideas hitting me!

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

 GB: I recently completed the sequel to Faith Awakened and a prequel series is also underway. There are the other upcoming anthologies mentioned above, plus I’ll soon be editing an Avenir Eclectia anthology which will have a few of my pieces in it. Four of my short stories are available as Kindle Singles and I will be adding more to that collection as well as making them all available on Smashwords and B&N.

BTS: Anything else you’d like to say?

GB: I recently got started on Pinterest and I’m really enjoying it: http://pinterest.com/splashdown/ Seems like a great way to collect links to the things I like as well as showcase my own work. I’m always happy to meet new people on Facebook and Twitter, too!

Here’s an excerpt from Grace’s Space Battles story ” Never Look Back”:

Never Look Back

Grace Bridges

I have heard tell of the battle frenzy, from times of old, but I never experienced it until now. Out here in the reaches of space, there may not be much comparison to Arthurian wars on muddy plains—but surely as heck, I feel the same righteous anger against my unjustified opponent. My blood boils at the thought of his attacks, even as I clutch at the arms of my chair to keep from being thrown around the room. I could attach the harness … if the ship stopped shaking for a moment. Something’s wrong with that design.

My companion, bending over her console, turns to look up at me. “He’s swinging round again! Coming straight at us—like he wants to ram us!”

“Hold her steady. He won’t do that. He’d be dead too.”

We become still and watch the displays. Closer and closer
the dark ship comes. At the last second he veers away. I
breathe again.

“What did he do that for?”

“Just trying to scare us. Cat and mouse.” Harrumph. “But I won’t
be the mouse in his trap.” We. I should have said we. But she appears
not to have noticed. It may be my battle, but now I have drawn her into
it, never ever what I wanted.

He shoots. A split second later, the ship bucks under us. My last
thought: I forgot the harness again…

I gazed at the star-encrusted universe and the huge curve of
Neptune, with its vivid blue bands and posse of tiny moons. I had seen
it countless times through a telescope in earlier days, but now it was so
close, it felt as if I could reach out and touch the shimmering surface. I
held out my gloved hand and watched the soft swirls of condensation
drift between my fingers like soap suds in a basin.

Somewhere out there was my enemy … dying or adrift? I
hoped we had incapacitated him enough that he wouldn’t return.
Somewhere, too, was the repair ship Kasif, coming to fix us. But she
was days away yet.

One last look, then I entered the airlock and activated it. Its hiss
roared in my ears after the silence of the vacuum. I glanced at the toolkit
I dragged with me, its pieces worn with the extreme strain I’d had
to place on them. I prayed it was enough. After twenty hours spacewalking
to mend the deadly puncture, all I wanted was to get out of
this suit. The airlock light moved to orange, and then after an age, to
green. I hauled on the handle and swung the thick inner door open.

The main hallway of the starship loomed before me, still lit only
by emergency panels. That wasn’t good. Things should have gone
back to normal once I’d repaired the damage.

Stars spin around us as we pitch end over end through space …
away from the scene of the battle, never to return. Why did he give up
now?

I shook the images from my mind. The Namaste was my home.
The only place ever worthy of the name. I sighed inside my helmet,
and the faceplate fogged a little more. Stepping over to the nearest
wall computer, I checked the oxygen level. It was almost normal, so I
flipped the catch on my helmet and yanked it off, my hair escaping its
ties to cascade down my back.

Never look back, that’s what I’d told myself after my last big
failure, back at the Explorers’ base on Mars. My personal vow was
to keep travelling outwards from Earth till old age got to me. Never
look back. Only forward. Get away.

Flash. Boom. The ship swaying madly. I don’t want to die…

Think forward, girl. You’re alive. Breathe.

The lights came back up just then and I smiled. One small victory.
I made for the bridge, letting myself bounce and feel the all-but-flying
sensation of low gravity. I’d keep it minimal to conserve power, just in
case the repair crew took longer to get here than we hoped.

I landed on my toes, slipped through the door, and commanded
a systems check to begin. Another minute and I’d be peeling off the
sweaty clothes under my spacesuit, once everything came up green.

“Marit! They’re coming about … their weapons are coming online
again. Incoming!”

The ship reported all systems marginally functional, except
propulsion. I’d managed to reduce the dizzying tumble to a torpid roll
right after the attack, but then we’d lost power. We would be stranded
until the rescue ship arrived. I sent off a brief message requesting full
towage—the base bosses mightn’t be happy about that, but the shipmonkeys
would be glad of the technical challenge. I strode back into
the hallway. Where was Lauren? I stretched my neck after the long
day in confinement. Piano music sounded from the central area, and I
hurried to unzip my outer suit. It fell to the ground and I stepped out,
leaving it where it lay. What was that odd smell?

Fear, then hope, in my colleague’s eyes. I think we got ’em!
High-five.

I shook out my clothing and entered the room. No one was there,
but the music player was illuminated. I peered at it. Bach’s Sinfonia
No. 4. Set on repeat. My eyes flicked here and there in the dim light
reflected from the hallway.

“Fire at will, kid!” Beams streak out from our ship’s bow.

“Lauren?” She wasn’t here. Perhaps she was in the bathroom, or
in her cabin. But why would she leave the music playing? Something
was wrong. My heart began to thud in my chest just as it had when I’d
spilled a whole week’s milk ration on the way home from the store at
nine years of age. The memory of the silent disapproval on my stepmother’s
face sent a chill down my back even now. To this day I was
determined to be the best at everything I set my hand to. I’d certainly
messed that up bigtime.

Lauren’s voice sounds in my helmet. “Weapons are back online. I
have no idea how, but they are!”

I moved back into the hallway in light bounds that hardly touched
the floor. “Hello?” No answer. I passed the open bathroom door. No
one inside. The smell grew stronger. I reached the row of cabins and
passed by the unoccupied ones.

The whump this time is deafening even through the helmet, the flash
steals sight, and it is all I can do to keep hold of the thrashing chair.

We weren’t set up to fight. We were explorers, and everyone knew
it. There shouldn’t even be anyone else in this sector of space. The
mission was dying, as all could see. Only Lauren and I remained, and
if either of us left, it would be closed down. We were in agreement to
decide together if it came to it, since one officer’s choice would mean
the departure of both in any case. But we were still here, clinging to the
spirit of adventure. After all, one never knew when new recruits would
come to us and restore the full potential of this ship. I lived in hope, and
in terror of having to return. But my worst fear had found me.

“He’s coming back! Quick, brace!”

A dim light burned in Lauren’s cabin. I wrinkled my nose. What
was that smell? It was almost like the heavy, sweat-tinged air you get
in a sealed room where someone has been sleeping a long time, only
it was even heavier, and made me feel tired just to breathe it. I pushed
the door all the way open and slipped inside.

I glance at the main viewscreen and remain transfixed at the sight
of a silhouette far too close for comfort.

A tall, fat candle burned on the nightstand, spent wax stalagtites
dripping off at odd angles. Lauren lay motionless on the bed, in her
spacesuit but without the helmet, arms and legs laid out ramrodstraight.
Mercy!

“Weapons are not responding.” Huh. Pitiful little defense lasers
that were only intended to deal with very minor asteroids in the ship’s
path. Like they’d help, even if they were working.

“Lauren!”

No reply. I perched on the edge of the bed and reached for her
hand. I pulled off her glove. Her fingers were cool to the touch, and I
rubbed them in both of mine. Still she did not move or wake. Her faint
breathing was steady. I poked her shoulder and my heart raced as she
showed no reaction.

They’re firing at us. Still! Can you imagine the nerve of them.

“Lauren, you wake up right now and tell me what you’ve done!” I
grabbed her by both shoulders and shook violently, continuing to yell
at her. She floated up off the bed as I rattled her, but she was as dumb
as a rag doll. I shook even harder, putting all my muscle into it. Lauren
must wake!

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here.

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet David Lee Summers

Published on by Bryan4 Comments

The anthology’s fourth tale comes from the man who edited two others in the Full Throttle Space Tales series and helped launch it: Professional astronomer David Lee Summers. He spends his nights assisting scientists on staff bi-weekly at Kitt Peak Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. On his off weeks and daylight hours, he edits and publishes Tales Of The Talisman, a quarterly print magazine of SF, F and Horror. He´s also edited anthologies like Space Pirates and Space Horrorsfor Flying Pen Press. His seven novels include Owl Dance, The Solar Sea and Vampires Of The Scarlet Order. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Realms Of Fantasy, Human Tales and 2020 Visions, along with the Full Throttle Space Tales anthology series. He also was the editor who gave me my [Bryan’s] first story sale. His lives with his wife and two daughters in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Find David online at http://t.co/CLubgQwm and http://t.co/7ZFubl99 , also on Facebook and Twitter as @davidleesummers. You can also  follow his blogs:  http://davidleesummers.wordpress.com, a general fiction blog, and  http://dlsummers.wordpress.com, a vampire fiction blog.  My novel The Pirates of Sufiro is available absolutely free as an ebook from both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com

BTS: David, you helped start the Full Throttle Space Tales series and have edited two of the anthologies so far. How did all of that come about?

David Lee Summers: Author David Boop and publisher David Rozansky had been meeting during the summer of 2007 and came up with the idea of putting together an anthology about space pirates.  David Boop told me about the idea at CopperCon in Phoenix that year and asked if I’d like to be the editor.  I gave it some thought and I started talking to David Rozansky.  Both Davids live in Denver and I met with them at MileHiCon about two months after that.  That was the point where Space Pirates was formalized.  Over dinner with some other authors, we came up with the idea that Space Pirates would be the first of a series of anthologies.  That was the birth of the Full-Throttle Space Tales series.

BTS: You’ve also had stories in most of the anthologies related to Captain Firebrandt and his pirates. Did that concept develop for FTST or out of the novels you’ve done with the same characters and settings?

DLS: Captain Firebrandt is a character that’s been kicking around my brain since about 1987.  He was the protagonist of my first novel, The Pirates of Sufiro.  That novel opens with Firebrandt, and his crewmembers Suki Mori and Carter Roberts being marooned on a distant planet.  They end up civilizing the planet and then getting involved in a conflict that shifts the whole galaxy’s balance of power.  That story is played out in the novels Children of the Old Stars and Heirs of the New Earth.  My stories in the FTST series are all set before The Pirates of Sufiro and tell the story of Firebrandt’s career in piracy before he was marooned  I’m hoping to collect Captain Firebrandt’s pirate stories into one volume sometime in the next couple of years.

BTS: Tell us a little about “Jump Point Blockade.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

DLS: In the Old Star/New Earth universe, jump points are the places where gravitational currents come together and allow space vessels to jump from system to system.  In this story, one Earth colony has blockaded another Earth colony’s jump point.  Meanwhile Ellison Firebrandt and his crew are taking advantage of this fact and raiding a mining facility operated by one of the governments.  The problem is they’re caught and some of Firebrandt’s crew are trapped in the mining facility.  Firebrandt makes a bargain to join the blockade rather than allow his crew to perish.  The story was inspired by Jean Lafitte’s role in the Battle of New Orleans.

BTS: Do the shorts follow a storyline tied to the novels or are they standalones?

DLS: Although each of the stories is a standalone, “Jump Point Blockade” pits Firebrandt and his crew against Captain William R. Stewart who they first met in the story “Hijacking the Legacy” that appears in Full-Throttle Space Tales #2: Space Sirens. 

BTS: How many novels have you written about these characters?

DLS: Ellison Firebrandt and Carter Roberts appear in three novels: The Pirates of Sufiro, Children of the Old Stars, and Heirs of the New Earth.  There is one more novel in the Old Star/New Earth universe called The Solar Sea, but that one is set before they’re born.   At this point, I have five prequel stories featuring Firebrandt and his crew—about 23,000 words of material in all.

BTS: You also edit Tales Of The Talisman and have written a number of novels. How did you get started as an editor?

DLS: In many ways my beginnings as an editor are tied to The Pirates of Sufiro.  When I first wrote the novel, my wife was in graduate school and was looking for a master’s project.  What she decided was to create an audio small press called Hadrosaur Productions.  The Pirates of Sufiro was to be the first book published.  We had started talking to some other authors and created a small anthology called Hadrosaur Tales as a way to showcase those people plus a few others who we hoped to lure to the press.  Eventually, the audio press went by the wayside and Hadrosaur Tales became a magazine in its own right.  After editing the magazine for ten years, we went through some format changes and renamed it Tales of the Talisman.  After starting the magazine, other publishers I worked with saw that I was an editor and have contracted my services and I’ve done some novel editing.  In addition to Hadrosaur Tales/Tales of the Talisman, I’ve edited a small literary magazine called Voces and I was layout designer for El Paso Community College’s magazine Chrysalis.

BTS: Has the FTST series been a success? What do you think is the appeal of these anthologies?

DLS: The books have attracted some “name” authors such as Neal Asher, Robert E. Vardeman, Sarah and Dan Hoyt, Selina Rosen, Dayton Ward and, of course, Mike Resnick.  Also, reviews have been generally positive, and the books seem to sell well for me and the other contributing authors I’ve spoken to.  That and the fact we’re on volume 6 all speak to the success of the books.  I think the appeal is the premise, these are meant to be fun, action-packed collections of science fiction tales.  Even within that definition, there is room for everything from serious, thoughtful stories to humor.  I think the variety of stories, the variety of authors, and the variety of themes all appeal to readers.

BTS: Who would you recommend them to as readers?

DLS: I would recommend them to anyone who likes a good, fun action-oriented science fiction tale.  The stories have humor, romance, strong science fiction ideas and fun.  If you like science fiction at all, it’s worth trying out this series.  I’m betting you’ll find several stories you like and maybe even some new favorite authors.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

DLS: My story “The Pirates of Baja” will be in the anthology Gears and Levers, due at the beginning of April from Sky Warrior Publishing.  My story “The Vrykolakas and the Cobbler’s Wife” is in Cemetery Dance Issue 66 which is hitting the newsstands as we speak.  Further down the road, look for my novel Dragon’s Fall: Rise of the Scarlet Order from Lachesis Publishing.  This novel tells about the formation of a band of vampire mercenaries.  In the meantime, I’m working on Wolf Posse, the sequel to my Wild West/Steampunk novel Owl Dance which is currently out from Flying Pen Press.

Here’s an excerpt from “Jump Point Blockade:” 

Jump Point Blockade

David Lee Summers

The privateer Legacy hung a short distance away from the asteroid designated MX-271. The asteroid was home to an automated mining operation owned by the Xerolith Corporation based on New Earth. The Legacy’s first mate, a sinewy, bald man named Carter Roberts, led the landing party. Roberts hacked into the mine’s computer network and unleashed a virus he hoped would knock out the defense grid.

A sturdy woman with close-cropped hair called Nicole Lowry piloted the craft. She checked the scanners. “The asteroid’s shields are disabled. I
see no indication of weapons being powered up.”

Roberts nodded, acknowledging the report, but he did not relax. Instead, he double-checked the readings himself. When he was satisfied,
he looked over at the pilot. “Take us in, but be careful.”

Lowry pulled back on the joystick and activated the landing rockets. “Your virus programs haven’t let us down yet. I’m not worried.”

“Neither am I, but that’s no excuse to let our guard down.” The first mate kept his eyes on the scanner readouts.

A few minutes later, the pilot pushed the joystick forward and shut off the rockets.

“So far, so good,” said Roberts. He commanded the station’s docking tunnel to extend and mate with the launch’s airlock. Unbuckling his harness,
he turned around and faced the landing party. “Let’s see what goodies the New Earthers have left us.” He drew his sidearm and opened the hatch.
Cautiously, Roberts moved forward into the docking tunnel. His nose wrinkled at the still, stale air. The only sounds he heard were the footsteps of the landing party behind him.

When he entered the mine complex itself, he saw a lone defense robot, its weapons pointed impotently at the floor. The first mate remained silent, while his eyes roved the room. Occasionally mining complexes left a few defense robots unjacked from the network, to keep them immune from viruses. Such robots were usually sound
activated. Satisfied nothing was moving, Roberts indicated a door at the far end of the room with his hepler pistol. Nicole Lowry crept beside him
and peered down the corridor, then activated a handheld computer.

She nodded and gave a thumbs-up—the signal that the path was clear and that they were heading in the right direction. They proceeded down the corridor until they came to a gaping door that led into a vast, darkened space.

Lowry activated a button just inside the door and banks of overhead lights flickered to life revealing a warehouse-like space containing processed bars of erdonium ore neatly stacked on anti-graviton carts. Roberts looked around to make sure there were no defense robots in sight. Finally, he relaxed and holstered his hepler pistol. Turning to face the landing party, he smiled. “This should pay our salaries for a few months.”

“All right, you swabs,” called Lowry. “Start moving those anti-grav carts to the launch. Step to!”

Just as the Legacy’s crewmembers began to fan out, the door to the storeroom slammed shut.
***
On Legacy’s battle deck, a pale man with stringy hair called Computer stood against one wall. His eyes roved back and forth as he communicated with the ship’s computer revealed by the metal grating beneath his feet. A moment later, his eyes ceased their near-constant motion and he turned to face the ship’s captain, Ellison Firebrandt.
“A New Earth battleship has just entered the system,” reported Computer.

The captain—a tall man dressed all in black with long, red hair worn loose about his shoulders—spat a curse. “Contact Roberts. Tell him to get back to the ship as fast as he can.”

Computer’s eyes roved back and forth for a moment. “Sir, Mr. Roberts is calling us.”

“Put him on,” ordered the captain.

“Captain, something’s gone wrong.” Roberts’s voice came through the intercom. “We just located the processed erdonium when the doors
to the storage facility closed behind us. We’re locked in. I’ve double checked the computer here. The virus is still active and defense systems
are shut down.”

“Could they have been commanded from outside?” asked Firebrandt.

“I suppose it’s possible.” Roberts sounded uncertain.

“A New Earth battleship just jumped into the system.” Firebrandt stepped toward the front of the battle deck and looked into the holographic tank. He saw a three-dimensional representation of a nondescript black cylinder hovering near a gray potato-shaped rock—the Legacy next to the mining asteroid. Some distance away, a marble-sized blue sphere that indicated the position of the New Earth battleship moved toward them.

“How could they know about us?”

“I don’t know,” said the captain. “Hang tight. We’ll find a way to get you out of there.”

“Captain, you should leave. We’ll be okay till you get back.”

“I’m not leaving you, Mr. Roberts.”

A new voice cut in on the transmission. “This is Captain William R. Stewart of the Battleship New New Jersey calling the unidentified ship at MX-271. State your purpose in this sector.” In the holographic tank, the blue sphere morphed into a menacing black cylinder bristling with gun ports. Legacy’s scanners had obtained a clear reading of the ship.

Firebrandt took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had tangled with Captain Stewart of the New New Jersey before. He looked at Computer
and instructed him to open a channel. A moment later, Computer nodded.

“This is the Earth vessel Dragonfly. We’ve sustained micrometeorite damage and sent a party down to the asteroid to look for repair parts.”
Firebrandt’s transmission was greeted with silence. He stepped back toward Computer and made a slashing motion across his throat,
then looked at the helmsman, Kheir el-Din who stood at an upright console in the center of the battle deck—the ship’s wheel. “What are
they up to?”

“Scanning us, I’ll wager,” said the helmsman. “Checking to see if we really are the good ship Dragonfly.”

“What are they even doing here?” Firebrandt’s eyebrows came together. “I thought the New Earthers were tied up with that stupid blockade of Alpha Coma Berenices’s jump point to Rd’dyggia.”

“The New Earthers say the Rd’dyggians are making weapons for the Alpha Comans.” Kheir el-Din toyed with a short string of beads strung in his long, black beard. “I thought you would support the blockade.”

The captain shrugged. “The Rd’dyggians make weapons for everyone. I have no objection to the blockade. I just don’t see how it will do any good.”

“MX-271 is on the jump path from the New New Jersey’s patrol sector to the blockaded jump point,” reported Computer.

The captain rubbed his bare chin. “They must have been summoned to the blockade.”

“The New New Jersey is powering up weapons,” said Computer.

In the holographic viewer, a translucent sphere appeared around the battleship indicating the range of its guns. Legacy was nearly within that sphere.

The captain pointed to the helmsman. “Prepare for emergency intrasystem jump.”

“Powering up the engines,” reported el-Din.

“This is Captain Stewart of the New New Jersey. We have scanned your vessel and determined that you are, in fact, the fugitive Gaean Privateer Legacy. Captain Firebrandt, I am authorized to destroy your vessel.”

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).

Preorder SPACE BATTLES & Get My Other Davi Rhii Short Story Free

Published on by Bryan11 Comments

To celebrate the release of Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, my first anthology as editor, I am giving away Rivalry On A Sky Course free at smashwords. If you preorder Space Battles and send me your order number via email or here, I’ll send you a code to download Rivalry for free. Rivalry and my Space Battles story “The Hand Of God” are the only current short stories set in the universe of my Davi Rhii novels, The Worker Prince and The Returning (forthcoming this June). For info on Space Battles , Rivalry On A Sky Course and The Worker Prince, click the links below the pics.

https://bryanthomasschmidt.net/the-worker-prince/ - Read about my debut novel here

 

 


 

 

Read about my debut novel here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read about Rivalry here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more about Space Battles here. Through April 17, Flying Pen Press has it at 40% off on preorders!

 

 

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Simon C. Larter

Published on by Bryan5 Comments

The third story in Space Battles is the third anthology sale for Author Simon C. Larter. A construction worker by day, who describes himself better than I ever could as: “Flash fiction specialist and writer of short stories that range from depressing to violent and depressing. Not a poet. Novelist-in-the-making. Tragic aesthete and lover of martinis. A tad ornery, most days.” He’s also a respected expert (at least in his own mind) on Vodka, of which he is an unabashed fan. Larter’s other stories can be found in the anthologies Notes From The Underground and Short Story America, Volume 1. A husband and father based in New Jersey, Larter can be found on Twitter as @simonclarter, at Facebook or via his blog/website at www.simonclarter.com.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

Simon C. Larter: I found out about the Space Battles anthology through some guy I met on Twitter and then at World Fantasy Convention in 2010. He turned out to be the editor. Win!

 BTS: This is your first science fiction anthology sale, correct? Tell us a little about “Like So Much Refuse.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

SCL: Yes. “Like So Much Refuse” started out as a much longer story, but was mercilessly hacked down to meet the word count requirements of the antho. I’d wanted to tell a multiple-POV story that highlighted the senseless slaughter of war while avoiding the traditional “good” protagonist and “bad” antagonist trope. I lost a lot of dead bodies in the editing process, but still tried to maintain a kind of moral ambiguity when it came to the two main characters. Rarely is war about moral absolutes, and I wanted to explore that idea in a futuristic setting. Also, I just liked the idea of guerilla warfare in space.

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

SCL: I wrote for most of my life, up through high school, but got all practical in my first run of college and decided to get an engineering degree. (Something about being able to make a decent living really appealed to me, I guess.) It took a helluva long time, during which I wrote next to nothing, but I eventually got that degree. The last liberal arts class I took before graduating, though, was a fiction writing course. It lit the fire in me again, and I’ve been writing ever since.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?

SCL: Nah. This was a one-shot deal. The Outworlders are just going to fall to squabbling amongst themselves after the fall of the Confederation anyway, and how much fun is it to write about squabbles?

BTS: Where’d your love of SF come from?

SCL: I would read anything and everything as a child, if it looked even remotely like fantasy or science fiction. Probably the first sci-fi I ever read was Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, but I’ve devoured everything from Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia series to Tad Williams’ Otherland books since then. Anything that lets me escape into another world for a while is okay in my book.

BTS: What are your writing goals? Full time? Novelist? Short story writer? All of the above?

SCL: I’d love to supplement the dayjob income with novel sales, and the occasional short story or flash fiction publication. Writing full time, of course, would be the ideal, but I’d be happy with enough extra money to keep me in vacations and vodka. You know how it is.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

SCL: I’ve a spec-fic novella in the works for a friend’s micropress, and a noir novella that’s almost submission-ready. After those are loose in the world, it’s back to the full-length novels, with occasional forays into shorter fiction when the mood strikes me. Which I’m sure will be often. Apparently the ideas don’t stop just because you don’t have time to write them all. Why is that, anyway?

Here’s an excerpt from “Like So Much Refuse,” Simon’s thrilling adventure about a saboteur taking on an experienced Admiral and her crew: 

Like So Much Refuse

Simon C. Larter

Engel left the airlock at a dead run and leaped outward, snapping his body rigid as he plunged into open space. He felt the vibration in his chest as he engaged the thrustpack, the shift in direction. Below him, the Galaxy gleamed dully in the light from the distant star at the center of the system. Its exhaust cones, black and mountainous, bulged from its aftsection: his destination. He triggered the thrusters again, briefly, then settled into the drop, the only sound in his ears the mild hiss of his rebreather and the crackle of the propaganda transmission from the distant command ship.

Behind him, his shuttle’s autopilot engaged—flames flared in Engel’s peripheral vision—and then shut off, the tiny
Mark IV shorthopper drifting out and away from the planet’s
gravitational field and the starcruiser’s light guns. He’d watched
several of his comrades’ ships strobe space with their atoms as he
made his approach run. Damn amateurs, he thought. Who trained
them, anyway?

But now there was nothing for him to do but plummet planetward,
watching as the Galaxy grew ever larger through the visor of his helmet.
His jaw tightened as he let his gaze glide across the gun batteries
and launch tubes ranked along the cruiser’s broad flanks. How many
lives had those weapons snuffed out? How many friends had tasted
vacuum because of them?

No more, he thought grimly. It ends tonight. If not me, another
will make it through.

Explosions winked in the darkness like static sparks as the Galaxy’s
flak guns opened fire in earnest. The city-sized exhaust cones loomed
closer. Engel grinned.

***
“It’s nothing but small craft, sir,” the scanner tech said. He turned
in his seat to regard the Admiral. “They come almost within flak range
then peel off or go adrift. Most of them are short-hop, single-man
shuttles, too. Not even interceptors.”

Admiral Johanna Stanche ran stiff fingers through her graying,
close-cropped hair and glared at the tactical projection at the far end
of the bridge. The threatening twinges that had been spiking the base
of her skull for the past two hours were coalescing into a serious headache.
She grimaced and kneaded the back of her neck. “Shuttles,” she
repeated.

“Yes, sir. The light cruisers and corvettes are keeping well back.”

“They’re testing our defenses,” Commander Martin Vandermeer
said. “Feeling us out.”

Stanche glanced toward him. A good man, she thought. Textbook
leader, but terminally lacking in imagination. For a moment, she
allowed herself to miss Marta’s sharp mind and ready grin, her
quiet support. But Vice-Admiral Marta Janowik had been killed three
months ago when the second to last remaining Confederation starcruiser
had been blasted to particles by the betrayers’ fusion bombs,
shredded and scattered like so much refuse. Now the Galaxy was the
last symbol of a dying dream, she the dream’s last line of defense.
Vandermeer’s stolid face was set in a scowl as he watched the
shuttles drifting in the TAC, an image winking out every so often as
the flak guns did their work. Beyond the swarm of small craft, hovering
at the edge of scanner range, the larger ships crouched, spider-like,
a promise of violence to come. And at the center of the projection,
the lifeless bulk of planet Arturus K-384 spun slowly on its axis, the
Galaxy a silver shard in its orbit.

“What’s the lower limit of our scanners?” the Admiral asked
suddenly.

“Sir?”

“Minimum energy signature. Craft size. What’s the smallest thing
they’re set to detect?”

The scanner tech turned to face her again. “Two meters, perhaps,
sir? Energy sig about half a kilowatt.”

“Dammit,” Stanche muttered. Then, “Dial it down. Fifty
centimeters and one hundred Watts. Do it now.” She turned to
Vandermeer. “And scramble the Falcons. All of them. Set the scanners
to rescue mode.”

“Admiral?”

“They’re jet-jockeying in, Vandermeer. Get those Falcons in the
mix, now!”

The Commander saluted crisply and turned to bark orders into the
nearest comm console. Stanche watched as the TAC image blurred,
then resolved into sharper focus once more. She clenched her jaw.
“There you are,” she said softly.

Between the ranks of light craft and the Galaxy, hundreds—perhaps
thousands—of small, humanoid shapes were closing on the starcruiser,
a diffuse, insidious wave.

“Recal the flak guns,” the Admiral said through her teeth. “Set the
bursts to go off closer. I want those jumpers vaporized.”

The bridge snapped into activity as her orders were relayed. On
the TAC, the slight, deadly shapes of the Falcon interceptors began
to appear, streaking out of the launch bays to chart a course for the
incoming enemy.

“Nice try, you sneaky bastards,” she said under her breath. “But
not good enough.”

***
Engel kept his arms tucked tight to his sides as he plummeted
toward the immense engine cowls at the rear of the cruiser—minimum
cross-section. Since his first jetbursts, he’d avoided using the
thrusters—minimum heat signature. With his right hand, he touched
the sleek bulk of the microfusion bomb strapped to his thigh and
grinned through gritted teeth—maximum damage.

The exhaust cones loomed large in his visor. The range numbers
in his HUD spun down so fast they blurred. He turned his head briefly
to watch pointillist flashes of strafe-fire rake through what he knew
was the main drop zone. The kill rate there had to be staggering. He
grimaced. “Requiem in pacem,” he murmured. “Poor bastards.” He
watched for a moment longer, then turned back to regard his target.
It expanded rapidly in front of him, a mountain of metal, coldwelded,
beaten and hardened to withstand the rigors of deep space and
warp travel. When the engines fired, the heat rippling from the metallic
skin would be enough to flash-fry human blood at a distance of a
quarter kilometer. But they were not firing now, and if all went well,
they would fire only once more: to end it. The technology that had enabled
the Confederation would be the means to its final destruction.

He engaged the thrusters, then executed a sustained burn that leadweighted
his body and sent him surging sideways. The blackened edge
of the exhaust cone shot past in his peripheral vision. Engel snapped
his torso forward, jackknifing to switch directions, and cranked the
thrustpack to full. The suddenness of the deceleration rattled his teeth
and tunneled his vision, but when the burn finished, he was floating
again, weightless, staring at a gigantic maw of blistered metal.
He feathered the thrusters once more, pushing himself into the
cavernous space. Tension he didn’t know he’d been retaining drained
from his shoulders as he drifted forward; there were no strafing batteries
in the exhausts. For the moment, he was safe—as safe as anyone could
be while hovering in front of something that produced sun-hot gas and
enough power to propel a million tons of metal death through space.
The deep dark of the exhaust cone swallowed Engel. He was a
glimmer, a speck against its immensity—a speck bearing death. The
bomb at his hip seemed to pulse with potential.

***
The muted buzz of proximity alarms and penetration alerts was
almost constant now, each one a spike in Admiral Stanche’s throbbing
skull. On the TAC, the rain of small craft and jumpers continued,
an unending wave of attackers. The Falcons were carving huge
swaths of destruction through the attack, wiping out jumpers in their
tens, hundreds, yet the assault continued.

And—more worrying—out beyond the thousand and one small
craft, the corvettes and light cruisers were beginning to edge closer.
It didn’t make sense, any way you cut it, she thought. The losses
were staggering on their part. Did they really have so many lives to
throw away? Even in the assault on the central planets they hadn’t
wasted soldiers like this. It was a distraction; it had to be. So what was
coming next?

“How many penetrations now?” she asked.

“One hundred and twelve,” Vandermeer responded without turning.

“All neutralized.”

“Check and recheck every error message in the system. Any other
anomalies, I want to know about them.”

The techs bent again to their work. The Admiral wiped the moisture
from the corners of her eyes with thumb and forefinger, wishing
her headache would subside. But the meds that took the edge off also
felt like they dulled her mind. She couldn’t afford that on a good day.
This was not a good day.

She walked over to lean down next to Vandermeer. “It’s a covering
maneuver,” she said, speaking for his ears alone. “Otherwise it’s
just throwing away lives.”

He glanced sideways at her. “Yes, sir.”

“I get the feeling we’re not going to like what they’re trying to
distract us from.”

“No, sir,” he said. Then, after a pause, “There’s some alerts from
the aft beam injectors. Channel integrity monitors are showing a break
or two. We get those regularly, though—those systems are touchy.”
Stanche didn’t hesitate. “Run a full scan anyway, and get teams on
the way there. Reroute the maintenance bots to those locations. I want
their camera feeds piped here directly.”

Vandermeer saluted. The Admiral nodded a brief acknowledgement
and returned to her station once more. Over a hundred hull penetrations,
she thought. They were getting through. She was going to start losing
people soon, if this went on—a further fraying of the Confederation’s
last tattered shreds. And they had no choice left but to continue fighting.
Every man and woman aboard knew what the PLM did with survivors.
Every channel in the galaxy had broadcast the fate of the Constellation.
She’d had friends on that ship.

“Nav,” she said, still staring at the TAC, “prep the mains. I want
those engines hot and ready.” There was a surprise coming, she knew
it. Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t stick around to find out
what it was. Live to fight another day, she thought wearily.

***
The glow of melting metal hummed in Engel’s peripheral vision
as he floated, weightless, near an injection port at the rear of the blast
chamber. If he engaged the zoom lens on his helmetcam and squinted
back the way he’d come, he could just see the tiny case of the microfusion
bomb where it hung in the chamber’s center, anchored by several
thousand meters of now-invisible fiber. The setup had been painstaking,
but he’d taken more than the necessary time, checking and doublechecking
the location, the connections. To come so far and fail due to
a foolish mistake would be inexcusable. He turned back to watch the
white-hot metal cool to red, the last shreds of his thermocord graying
and flaking to dust.

A circular chunk of alloy loosened and drifted away from the
exhaust cone wall. Engel batted it aside and leaned close, flicking
his miniflood to life. A beam of light pierced the darkness, hazed
by residual gas from the vaporized metal, and gleamed on the walls
of the injection port beyond. He played the floodlight over the blank,
metalloid walls for a moment, then reached forward and pulled himself
through the hole.

Reaching for the second thermocord coiled at his waist, Engel laid
it in place on the wall and retreated into the immense dark once more.
White heat lit the tunnel and triggered the autodim on his visor. When
it had subsided, he placed his palms on the melted metal edge of the
hole and drifted into the port again. Now the miniflood illuminated a
ragged, empty circle in the polished perfection of the injector—beyond
it a near impenetrable tangle of ducts, wiring, coolant hoses. He
slipped through the hole, twisting to avoid the thin traces of sensor
wire, and reached for the floating disc of metal set loose by the thermocord
burn through.

Turning, he replaced the disc in its hole and began to weld it back
in place. Wouldn’t be a perfect repair, he thought, but Command had
been clear: it only needed to hold for a few seconds. Once the subatomic
stream hit the burn chamber, the bomb he’d planted would do
its work in short order. The major portion of his job was complete.

And should the bombs fail to work as designed? There was
always plan B.

Through the dark plastic of his visor he watched the spitting,
sparking light of his welding arc trace its slow circle, a countdown
clockface, measuring the minutes until the end of it all.

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Author Gene Mederos

Published on by Bryan1 Comment

The second story in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 is by Gene Mederos. Born in Cuba and raised in Brooklyn, he wrote his first story in second grade. Mederos received a BFA in Theater from the University of Miami and has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and various odd jobs including a seven year stretch at the The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in NewYork City. In 2007, he discovered filmmaking and currently teaches editing and filmmaking at the Santa Fe Community College. Most recent stories in print include the stories “Moons of Blood and Amber” in the Tangle XY anthology published by Blind Eye Press, and “A Touch of Frost” in the Space Horrors: Full-Throttle Space Tales #4 anthology published by Flying Pen Press. He can be found online at Facebook or via his website at http://lostsaints.com.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

Gene Mederos: I was in the Space Horrors anthology and I like the imprint, it hearkens back to yesteryear.

BTS: Tell us a little about “The Thirteens.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

GM: At the core, the story is about tolerance for diversity, even toleration for the intolerant. It’s an old Sci-Fi trope, that the only thing that will unite warring parties is a bigger, badder alien or even the unknown.  As for the inspiration, I have friends from the extreme left to the extreme right, politically, so it wasn’t hard to craft the mindsets for the characters.

BTS: You’ve contributed to multiple anthologies in the Full Throttle Space Tales series. Are they tied to this story in any way?

GM: They nominally take place in the same universe, one where physics is not as abridged as on Star Trek and Star Wars, but faster than light travel is available, and about two hundred years in the future.

BTS: How’d you come to be involved with this series?

GM: My friend Trent Zelazny put me in touch with David Lee Summers who was putting together the Space Horrors anthology. It’s all about who you know…

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

GM: I’ve always loved stories, and am always telling stories.  It was a natural progression to start writing stories to share with others that way.

BTS: Where’d your interest in SFF come from?

GM: Comic books, the original Lost in Space and Star Trek, and the first musty hard cover edition of Dune I found at the local library.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?

GM: Yes, as a vehicle, or a common canvas, not necessarily with any of the characters already seen in print, but cameos are fun.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

GM: I have lots in the works, lol, most writers do. I’ve submitted a story to Bad Ass Fairies 4 which I hope they’ll publish, and am hunkering down to write an extreme planet story for another anthology, and I have the requisite novels.  But I believe mastery of the short story form is a prerequisite to a good novel, so I consider myself still in training.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Thirteens,” Gene’s exciting story from Space Battles:

The Thirteens

Gene Mederos

Nestled deeply in the foam mattress of the semi-luxurious hotel suite her rank afforded her, Captain Andromeda Sax was sound asleep when her com went off. The double pulse told her it was something important enough to warrant a secure connection. Even less than half awake her hand automatically flew to the spot on her jaw below her right ear. She pressed the small stud embedded there under her skin.

“Go ahead.”

“Captain, a bogey has entered the system,” the officer of the watch on board her ship, La Espada de la Libertad, informed her.
That could have been anywhere from four to six hours ago, depending on which of the outer system beacons had first detected
the incoming ship and transmitted the alert. A bogey was a ship that did not, or could not, transmit a valid ID code. It could be a smuggler, a legitimate freighter with a screwy comp—or it could be the enemy. Sax allowed herself a small smile; after all, there was no
one around to see it.

“Recall the crew, priority one.” That gave the crew ten minutes to
get back aboard the ship. She spared one last glance at her room. Aquarii
Station was on the frontier, but it still managed to offer most of the comforts
of the more cosmopolitan stations of the home-worlds. Accommodations
on La Espada were much more austere. She smiled again.
Five minutes later she strode onto the bridge. She hadn’t really had
time to dress, just comb her short-cropped jet-black hair and throw on
her officer’s greatcoat, but the voluminous garment covered her from
neck to ankles. And if anyone noticed she was wearing slippers instead
of boots, they wouldn’t dare comment on it. The guards at the
door snapped to attention. The crew on the bridge was all in uniform
and seated at their stations. She always kept a full watch on duty while
the rest of the crew took liberty.

“Inform the stationmaster we are launching to investigate,” she instructed
the com officer, then requested the general hail. “Emergency separation from
Aquarii station in T-minus four minutes.” That was sure to make the stragglers
scramble, for anyone left behind would have to fend for themselves out of
their own pocket. Stations were notorious for separating crew from their coin,
and the community service often imposed to pay off a debt was the most odious
of station maintenance work. Some of the crew would not return, for the
ship had its own share of odious duties as well as providing a greater chance
of getting killed. She’d deal with any of those persons when she returned. She
never thought ‘if’.

“Release hook-ups,” she ordered on the mark.

“Hook-ups released,” the officer at conn replied. She heard the
usual chorus of clicks as everyone strapped themselves in.

La Espada was now completely on its own power, air and water.
Sax strapped herself into her chair.

“Cast off.”

The station’s magnetic clamps released the ship and she imagined
the hiss of air as the powerful propellant tanks pushed them away
from the station and felt the familiar tug as the gravity provided by the
station’s rotation gave way to the gravity generated by the ship’s sudden
acceleration. She felt the weight ease an instant before the conn
announced they were standing clear of the station.

“Full sail,” she ordered. The most insane and courageous members
of her crew were the riggers. At her command they jetted out in EVA
suits along the masts and struts to unfurl the giant micro-thin solar sails.
The riggers claimed watching the golden sails catch the rays of the sun
was akin to a religious experience. She’d never seen the phenomenon
herself, but figured it must be quite a sight if it could induce one to hurl
oneself into the void to see it.

Acceleration under sail would increase slowly, but surely.

“Begin rotation,” she ordered.

“Beginning rotation,” the engineering deck replied on the ship-wide
hail, the only warning the crew would get that up and down had to be
taken into account again. The sound of the engines that rotated the cylindrical
ship within its frame of struts and masts starting up did not need to
be imagined. It reverberated and shook throughout the ship. Fortunately,
once the ship began to spin at speed, inertia was maintained by magnetic
induction and the engines would be almost silent.

The captain felt herself sink ever so slightly into the cushioning. A
thought, via implant and wireless transmission, was all it took to make
the chair turn slightly on its horizontal axis. She, like the crew, enjoyed
the automated, computer guided functions on the ship while she
could. During battle, with the comp taken offline, everything had to
be done manually. The navigator’s station came into view and with it
the senior nav officer, Poole. This was the one crewmember she would
never leave behind. As she understood it, the ship ran on numbers, and
this was the man who crunched them when the comp was down.
Poole raised his head from his displays, as if he could feel her
scrutiny like a sensorite. Like all the human beings from his planet,
Cygni-I, his skin had a slight blue cast and his hair was colorless.
These obvious and innocuous signs of the genetic modifications
undertaken by his ancestors to survive on their relatively oxygenpoor
world were all that the Purists needed to hate Poole’s kind. Sax
thought them fools. If anything, the Cygni were far more dangerous
for what they had done to their minds.

“Have you correlated a course, Mr. Poole?”

“Yes, captain.”

“Let’s have it then.”

Immediately, a heads up display appeared before her, La Espada’s
course outlined against the current layout of the system in a bright
certain blue. Lines shaded from yellow to green showed the most
probable courses of the bogey, extrapolated second by second as more
sensor data came in from the beacons arrayed throughout the system.
She was pleased to see that the most probable vectors would intercept
with her ship well above the plane of the ecliptic, where there would
be plenty of fighting room, if necessary. She knew that the universe
was more empty space than matter, but to her the Aquarii system had
always seemed cluttered with asteroids, comets and other debris.

Debris that could damage her ship.

She willed La Espada to go faster, and closed her eyes to imagine
the nonexistent creaking of the rigging and masts as light pushed
the solar sails out against the star’s pull on the ship. She’d been on a
sailing ship once, on the oceans of Maravilla, before the Associated
Worlds lost the Lalande system to the Purists. Someday, she meant to
win that world back. But since the faster than light engine could not be
used anywhere near a star’s gravity well, the ship could go faster only
as they got farther from the star. She could order a burn, and kick the
ship up to her full speed of a hundred kilometers per second, roughly
a third the speed of light. But if she were headed for battle, she would
be wise to reserve all the fuel in the tanks for maneuvers.

It would take a little under thirty hours for the ships to meet, and
there was much to be done. “Steady as she goes,” she ordered Poole
as she turned her chair to line up with the exit from the bridge. This
brought Augusto Lo into view. His bronze-brown skin was a few
shades lighter than the captain’s, his eyes and tousled hair darker. He
was actually earth-born, yet had rejected the Purist philosophy and
immigrated to an Associate world as a youth. He was slouched at his
usual station at the rear of the bridge, his eyes half closed, his head
resting on his fist, his other hand fiddling idly with the buckles on his
disheveled jumpsuit. To all appearances he was oblivious to what was
going on around him. But it was all an act. The captain knew that the
‘State Liaison Officer’ never missed a thing that happened on the ship.
So she wasn’t the least bit surprised when he came up behind her in
the corridor as she waited for the lift. The guards wouldn’t stop him from
coming after her like that, after all, they ultimately answered to him.

“Odd, isn’t it?”

She raised an eyebrow in reply.

“If I’m not mistaken, that bogey is following the same trajectory
as the last Purist ship that attacked this system.”

The captain nodded. “Yes, I’d noticed that.”

“But that approach gives you, the defender, the weather gauge. The
bogey has to expend fuel to fight the same solar wind that La Espada
has at her back, filling our sails, leaving it less fuel to maneuver. These
were decisive factors in our victory against the last incursion.”
Again, the captain raised her brow.

“And your superior skill at command and tactics, of course,” he
amended with a small grin. Sax smiled in return, more because of his use of
the archaic term ‘weather gauge’ than his sardonic compliment. “Everything
means something,” he said in return.

“Then figure it out,” she said, after pausing for a moment to visualize
her deck number.

Lo nodded. “Nice slippers,” she heard him say as the lift doors
closed.

An hour before intercept the captain was touring her ship as she
was wont to do before a battle. And she had no doubt that there would be
a battle—the bogey’s course was lining up exactly with the last Purist
ship’s incursion. A statistical impossibility, Poole had assured her.
So this ship was using the last ship’s comp data, possibly retrieved
from the latter’s logs, which would have been downloaded into a locator
beacon before the ship went into battle. It made no sense to her,
but then, she thought the whole Purist agenda made little sense. She
entered the rigger’s loft in the core of the ship. Since the ship rotated
around the core, there was no gravity in the long, cold cylinder. It
was the perfect place to store cargo, house the ship’s engines and, of
course, the riggers.

A rigger spotted her and snapped to attention, his elongated
prehensile toes grasping a length of cable to steady himself. He
was blond and blue-eyed, not too bad looking, with a crooked nose
and a wry twist to his mouth that suggested he was always smiling.
He was tall and thin, his arms and legs of equal length, with all twenty
digits being equally dexterous. His name was Jaller. He’d served on
her ship for the past four years and she knew him to be brave, loyal,
and kind. And even though the rigger’s section of the core was only
partially heated, he was naked, as was their wont. Diversity. The idea
and the reality that the Purists condemned as unnatural.

She drifted among the riggers, male and females both, for no few
minutes, praising their courage, thanking them for their service and
exhorting them to battle. Despite her duty uniform and her boots, she
still managed to skillfully make her way in Zero G among the giant
web of cables that the riggers called home. Their ancestors had destroyed
their world in a paroxysm of industrialization that had seen the
world laid waste in just six generations after colonization. The riggers
had been forced to evacuate onto space stations and ships and had
during the centuries of the sundering, when all of humanity’s worlds
had lost contact with each other and faster than light travel had been
abandoned, modified themselves to live in micro-gravity.
Members of no fewer than five of the existing seven modified human
races served on her ship and of the remaining two, the Aquarii had inadvertently
made themselves highly susceptible to space sickness and the folk of
Twobit were devout pacifist.

Her last stop on her tour was always the medical deck. Doctor
Stures was a sensorite, his people hailed from the dust-cloaked planet
of Gliese 876, Umbra. The world was metal poor and had erratic
magnetic fields so technology had been difficult to maintain.

Without much artificial illumination, the people of that world had
modified their other senses to compensate for the gloom. His skin
was blue-black with raised oblong bumps that ran from his hairline
to his jaw. She knew them to be receptors, allowing the doctor
to feel minute changes in temperature, in air pressure and displacement,
even vibrations. His eyes were hidden behind a band of dark
glass, to protect them from the ship’s bright illumination. He greeted
her in his usual way.

“Ah, Captain, in excellent health I see.” And by see he actually
meant by smell, by feeling her body temperature and by hearing her
heart beat in her chest. “All is in readiness for the coming battle.”
She had expected no less. His people were sensitive by nature and
design, but they were also pragmatists. He wasn’t one of those medical
officers who questioned the need for battle.

“We don’t know that the bogey is hostile—” she began to say.

“Pshaw,” the doctor interjected. A liberty he could take here, on
his deck. “From what I’ve heard, how could it be anything else?”

“Indeed,” the captain said, raising her brow. News travelled fast
on a ship. She believed the ancient term was ‘scuttlebutt’. Satisfied
that her ship was in order, she headed for the bridge.

As the captain stepped onto the bridge, the ship’s executive officer,
Commander Ortencia, saluted and left. The XO’s station during battle
was located close to the core, half the ship’s length from the bridge, a
hopefully safe distance from anything that might happen to or on the
bridge. The commander would monitor all activities on the bridge from
there and issue orders in support of the captain’s activities during battle.
In exchange, Major Drummond, the Captain of the Guard, took a station
on the bridge. When ships sailed on oceans his troops would have been
called marines.

“We are coming to transmission and targeting range,” Poole said.

“Furl sails, retract masts,” she ordered the riggers. “Advise the
ship and begin viral transmission,” she ordered the com officer.
She waited until all decks had acknowledged.

“Take the computer network offline, Mr. Poole.”

A few seconds later she saw the board at the Armscomp station
light up.

“Bogey firing missiles!”

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).

SPACE BATTLES Author Profile: Meet Author Anna Paradox

Published on by Bryan1 Comment

The author of the opening story for the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, Anna Paradox enjoys writing, science fiction (sometimes the two combined) and poker. Her first novel, The Cracked Bell, is available as a free download. Her short fiction has been published in the award-winning anthology Polaris: A Celebration of Polar Science,  in the previous Full Throttle Space Tales anthologies Space Pirates: Full-Throttle Space Tales #1, Space Sirens: Full Throttle Space Tales #2 and Space Horrors: Full Throttle Space Tales #4, and in Tales of the Talisman. Her second novel Embers of Humanity is here Her workbook for writers, From Wishing to Writing is here. She can be found online at Facebook and via her website at www.annaparadox.com.

BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?

 Anna Paradox: I’ve been following the Full Throttle Space Tales series from the beginning. It has had a remarkably high percentage of stories I enjoy reading. So when I heard about Space Battles, I thought, there’s a theme I can do something with, and I was glad to submit a story.

BTS: Tell us a little about “Between The Rocks.” What’s it about? Where’d this particular idea come from?

AP: I’ve been thinking a lot about how people will expand into the solar system. There’s a lot of room out there—room enough for a variety of different approaches to colonization. Like the immigrants to the U.S., some may go seeking freedom they can’t have at home. “Between the Rocks” tells of one group fighting to preserve their homes and families built by hard work on an asteroid from another group that sees what they have and decides to steal it.

BTS: You’ve contributed to several anthologies in the Full Throttle Space Tales series. Are they tied to this story in any way?

AP: My stories all loosely fit into a future where humans are expanding into space. None of them share any characters. In my Space Pirates story, we’ve colonized the Moon. In the Space Horrors story, we make regular trips to Mars. In “Between the Rocks,” we are starting to colonize the asteroids and outer moons. My story in Space Sirens is set in the furthest future, since we’ve reached other solar systems and established trade with other intelligent species.

BTS: How’d you come to be involved with this series?

AP: I had the good fortune to share a panel at Coppercon with David Lee Summers, and he told me about the first anthology, Space Pirates. I was pleased to submit a story, and even happier to have it accepted!

BTS: How’d you get started as a writer?

AP: I started writing stories in grade school. One early piece was a satire about the sad state of the food in the school cafeteria. I’ve continued to write short stories ever since. I wrote one novel after college, and another for Nanowrimo in 2002 or 2003. My first sales were poker articles. Then I sold a story to Julie Czerneda for her anthology Polaris. Science fiction is where my writer’s heart yearns to play. However, most of my working time goes to helping other people write and, for the moment, to graduate school.

BTS: Do you have plans to do any more with this universe?

AP: I have several novels outlined, and a couple of them belong in this universe. To me, this looks like the shape of the future I’d want to live in. The best long run goal I can think of for humanity is to play so that future generations can have more choices. That means giving us more places to live as well as taking care of this planet—to me it makes no more sense to foul our nest than to never leave it. So if I have no reason to make a different assumption, my stories tend to fit in this universe.

BTS: What other projects do you have in the works that we can look forward to?

AP: The novel that I’m most excited about now is called A Game of Christmas. Just when humanity has worked out how to stop violence against each other—including some fairly draconian laws against any depiction of using force against another human, such as most of our current movies and video games—we are attacked by aliens who have no such compunctions. That leaves our only defense in the hands of a loose coalition of underground gamers and weapon collectors. I hope to reorganize my time so that I can have it out in 2014. Goodness, how time flies!

Here’s an excerpt from Anna’s fast paced action story “Between The Rocks” which opens the Space Battles anthology:

Between the Rocks

Anna Paradox

“I can’t wait to get home,” Xiao said, taking off his helmet.

We were all thinking it. Home was Old Lumpy, an asteroid hauled into Jupiter orbit and refining fuel for passing ships. In a decade of habitation, we’d slowly built ourselves comforts like hot showers and hydroponics parks. With our hold full of ore from another, less welcoming rock, it would be good to go wash the grit off ourselves and cook a few hot meals.

“Give me a flight check, then, and we’ll be on our way,” I said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Xiao with a wide grin.

Four of us ran The Courtly Vizier. Despite the tony name, our ship
was little more than a utility truck in space. We alternated scoop runs
on Jupiter’s atmosphere with mineral runs to other local rocks, to supply
the refinery on Old Lumpy. Faster, sleeker ships bought our fuel to
venture farther out in the solar system. The Viz turned slowly and accelerated
like a peashooter-propelled iceberg, and quarters were tight,
but she’d been built to last. I gave her bulkhead an affectionate pat
when we’d completed the flight check and lifted off for home.
With Xiao handling the engines, and Jackson keeping his eyes on
the monitor, I had time to revise my letter to Earth. It wasn’t going
well. If I sounded too needy, we might get dregs, and if I didn’t make
our case, we might get nothing at all—either could be a disaster. I’d
just about decided to join Nogal where she was taking her sleep shift
in the two-bunk closet we called the cabin when Jackson spoke up.

“That’s odd. Grandpa isn’t answering the hail.”

I glanced over to where he sat fiddling with the radio tuning.
“Loose wire?”

He shook his head. “I can read the buoys fine. Although…” He
flipped quickly through the frequencies. “Only the sunward buoys
are responding. The leeward ones—I’m not getting anything from
them.”

We had four buoys each leading and trailing the ore processing
center in Jupiter orbit. They gave us early warning of storms below
and visitors above. To have four go out at once—felt like more than
chance.

“Xiao, ease her down. Let’s come in quietly. We’ll get a look when
we come around Jupiter.”

I rose above my seat as Xiao cut the engines. The Courtly Vizier
continued over the horizon of Jupiter on momentum. I strained forward
against my restraining straps.

“Jackson, get me a magnified view of Old Lumpy.”

How many times had I returned home? This time, something had
changed. The monitor view zoomed in on the asteroid that held our
friends, our families, our food supply, and everything we needed to
refine our fuel and water … a black streak crossed the rise where the
communications tower should have gleamed.

“Helmets! Now!” I thumbed the intercom. “Stasia! Suit up! We
have an emergency.”

“What is that?” asked Xiao.

I pulled my helmet to me, started buckling it on. “It looks like a
burn. I can think of a handful of ways that could happen, and for all of
them, I want your helmet on. Move it, Len!”

Jackson finished sealing his helmet to his suit first. He left monitor
one on Old Lumpy, and on the other two began scans of the region.
Once I was sealed up, I tapped into the suit-to-suit system. “Nogal,
are you suited?”

“Getting there, Captain.” She sounded sleepy.

“Make it fast. Communications are down with home. We may
have trouble.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Jackson, do you see anything moving out there?”

“Nothing yet. Scanning.”

Xiao hovered his hands over the engine controls. “Captain, what
happened? Was there a fuel explosion?”

“That … would be the most positive possibility. I don’t think it’s
likely though. Jackson, check my thinking. What do you make of that
black streak?”

“Like someone deliberately turned their engines on our communications
tower.”

“And that would be the worst possibility.” The black mark tapered
at each end. I could now make out the silvery slag that had been the
comm tower—fortunately unmanned—right in the center of the mark.

“But I think that’s it.”

Between us and home lay a few dozen large rocks. Big enough to
hide a ship? Would they know where we were coming from?
Jackson studied war, played battle games. I’d watched him arranging
the ships on the screen, maneuvering for position against a
computer opponent. “Which way will they expect us to dodge?”
He hesitated a moment. “New players tend to dodge straight right
or left. Up has tactical advantages, since we’re in Jupiter’s gravity
well. I’m not sure how much he’s thought about this.”

“Who would do this?” asked Xiao.

“Take us towards eight o’clock, full burn on my mark. Mark in
thirty seconds.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Nogal, are you suited and strapped in back there?”

Her voice came back over the suit system, no longer sleepy. “Yes,
all connected, Captain.”

“Good.” I watched the timer count down the seconds. “Mark,
Xiao. Now!”

The Viz shuddered as the engines pumped directly to full. The
acceleration pressed me into the seat, and I slid slightly to the right.
Only a little. The Viz was born on Luna, and our max acceleration
was three times Earth gravity. We could direct at most half of that laterally.
The rest was forward motion only. Fortunately, we had plenty
of fuel. We’d made it a habit since the refinery went live.

Xiao’s question still hung in the air. “Who? As far as I know,
there’s only a handful of ships nearby, and none of them have a reason
for this.”

“Right,” said Jackson. “The Feds have three cruisers—and they’d
send a diplomat if they had a problem with us. Our last customer headed
outward three weeks ago.”

“Aliens?” asked Xiao.

“This isn’t what I’d hope for first contact,” I said. “Keep your
mind on your driving, Xiao, and we may know who soon.”

Jackson flipped a rotating series of images onto the monitors.

I watched them go by. Xiao held our course. I thought about our
options. We had no guns. There were a couple small explosives we
used to loosen ore from asteroids. Our drive glowed brightly behind
us—and we could shift it thirty degrees to any side over the course
of a few seconds. We had a cargo hold full of ore. Unless they’d stay
put long enough for us to apply our jackhammer and shovels to their
hull, that was it.

Another image flipped away from the monitor. Then it flipped back.

“Do you see that, Captain?” asked Jackson.

I stared at the image. “What do you see?”

“That glint, underneath the asteroid, to the right.”

Then I spotted it—something shiny and metallic revealed where the rough contours of the asteroid left a gap.

Continued in Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 which you can purchase here starting now (preorders end April 17).