Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 67

Writing in Public: Story 4 (Novella), Chapter 9

[image error]CHAPTER 9

Though Hope went to sleep right away, it was a strange sleep. She was aware of the weight pressing down on her, and her sweat dripping off her. The dreams marched in, and with it, three ghosts circling around her. These were the ghosts of the movies, not of her reality: faces bloody and torn, like death had distorted them into monsters. They were human, or at least had once been human.

One of them had this strange looking drum that had stalactites running down from the top and glistening with white wax. And when it slapped the top of the drum with a three fingered hand, the sound wasn’t that nice beat that worked into her bones, but rocks flying against metal.

The other two ghosts crowded around the first. Lipless mouths yawed open, revealing blackness. They screamed, trying to drown out the drumbeats, and the drummer ghost pounded harder, grinning, as he tried to drown out the screamers.

Hope snapped awake.

The pounding didn’t stop.

It was coming from outside.

Brooks and Jian were already out of bed, Devil Blasters in their hands. The pilots had Devil Blaster rifles.

Only Hope was unarmed.

Hope swallowed, her mouth going dry. All she could think was that she was unarmed and as slow as a turtle. Easy prey.

The windows outside the shuttle showed a black sky. No moon out.

Her stomach jerked.

Something rushed at the window, like a pile of rags, but not solid. She caught a glimpse of three gleaming eyes, red and feral.

They looked in. Right at her.

Then the shape dropped away from the window. Like it hadn’t been there.

The pounding stopped.

Men’s voices. Yells.

Brooks peered out the port side window. “Mel’s Marines are out there.” He glanced back at Jian. “Ma’am?”

Jian looked at everyone’s face in turn. “We stay. The Marines know what they’re doing. We’ll just be in the way.”

A minute passed. Perhaps two.

It seemed longer.

A sharp, official sounding knock came from the door, accompanied by a muffled voice.

Jian told the computer to open the door. One of the Marines came in. His Devil Blaster was holstered. Hope shifted around on her bed, untangling her legs, so she could see him better. He wore a ‘just dare mess with me attitude’ like a badge of honor.

“Everyone all right?” he said.

Jian stepped forward. “Yes, Gunny. What happened?”

Gunny. It took a second for Hope to remember she’d heard that on Kangjun. Must be a rank of some kind. She’d ask Brooks later.

“We don’t know, ma’am. Something came through the camp. Knocked down one of the tents, overturned equipment.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“No ma’am. Whatever it was seems to be gone.”

Hope slid to the edge of the bed. “Excuse me, Gunny?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Hope found herself working through her words carefully. This might have been a ghost, and if it was, an angry one. Or it could have been someone living.

But she felt uncomfortable giving the Marine orders.

“Leave everything alone,” she said. “I want to see the damage in daylight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Just like that. She swallowed, feeling like her world had been turned upside down.

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe

Writing in Public: Story 4 (Novella) Chapter 8

[image error]CHAPTER 8

By the time the five meteorite hunters got back to camp, the sun had dropped into the horizon. Hope shivered. It was already getting noticeably cooler. A fire was in sharp contrast against the deepening sky, set in a oil drum. A Marine and the Kangjun pilots were gathered around it.

“It drops to seventy at night,” Sanger said. “Doesn’t sound like it’s cold, but it’s a fifty degree drop.”

He ambled over to the join the others at the fire.

Brooks said, “The shuttle can be heated.”

It was back inside the shuttle for another meal—some kind of purple goop, a red vegetable cut into sticks like French fries, and a tight spiral that might be desert.

“Do you always eat local food?” Jian asked as she used a cracker to scoop up the purple goop. A fat drop escaped and plopped on her uniform. She grimaced and used a napkin to wipe it off.

“When it’s safe for humans, yes,” Mel said. “It can help with the mediation. Give us something to talk about. Swapping recipes is a very old custom.”

To her credit, Mel was eating the same gravity friendly food, though she didn’t have to. Hope stuck a finger in the purple goo. It didn’t look appetizing at all, but it was pretty tasty, especially once she used a cracker. The red vegetable had an earthy flavor. It had been drizzled with oil and a slightly sweet vinegar.

Mel glanced at Hope. “Now anything you want to ask? It’s your lead.”

Mel’s question caught Hope off guard. Not because it was an unusual question, but because of the respect in her voice. On Kangjun, the crew had to be ordered by Graul to behave properly around Hope–and he’d enforced the orders by transferring people off. So she sometimes got sullen acquiescence.

Hope thought it was one of the reasons Graul kept her dirtside trips in such small groups.

She finished chewing on the red vegetable, which was quite crunchy, giving herself a moment to think.

“I’d like to get more information,” she said. “Ghosts typically return to a specific spot that meant something to them. Like Captain Lopez returns to Kangjun because it was his first ship.”

“Do they have die in that place?” Jian asked.

Hope relaxed, feeling on surer ground. “No. Captain Lopez died on a dirtside mission.”

She’d looked it up, and now that she saw what Mel did in person, it made her appreciate how dangerous this could be. The military wasn’t always a good choice for mediation. Hope had seen that herself when she was trying initially to get in shape at the gym. If it didn’t fit what they knew, they tried to make it fit, rather then being flexible.

Brooks sipped from a bottle of water. “There’s sure not a lot out here for a ghost to be tied to. Could someone have brought the ghost?”

“Brought?” Mel asked, eyes brightening with curiosity.

Jian answered. “The Corellians were using drugs to keep their ghosts from moving on. They ran out of room, and started transporting them to other planets. Sort of like illegal immigrants, ghost-style.”

“We can check with the scientists, see if they saw anyone hanging around when the ghost first appeared,” Mel said.

Hope pictured a ghost sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep, chilling as someone drove him out to the camp site.

“Ma’am,” she said to Jian, “can we ask Kangjun to do a scan of the area? Maybe there’s a shipwreck buried nearby.”

“I can try,” Jian said. “We can set a message drop to go as soon as the interference clears. The problem is we don’t know how long that will be.”

“Maybe there’s some local history that might tell us something,” Mel said. “We can go to town tomorrow and ask around. There are a few humans who have been here for a long time. They might have heard something.”

“Will we see the aliens then?” Hope asked.

“The town is mostly for the mix of visitors the planet gets, but the ones I’ve been working with will meet us there,” Mel said.

Hope liked that idea. Meeting the touchy-feely aliens in a public place.

After they finished up eating, Hope grabbed her shower bag and headed for the camp’s wooden stalls. She was so tired out that she would have passed on the shower and just gone to bed, but between the sweat and sand, she itched all over from the dirt.

The shower stalls were wooden boxes with tanks on top, and a gravity lever. There were two for the women and two for the men. Someone had painted on the shower doors in bright red “Women. Do NOT use my water.”

Had to be Dr. Lewis. Hope bet the men had been stealing her water to wash their clothes.

As she walked up, one of the doors banged open. A big boned woman in shorts and a t-shirt came out, her hair plastered back. The woman stopped and stared at Hope like she had two heads.

Lewis’ lips curled distastefully.. “You’re that ghost woman from Alien Affairs.”

Yes, Hope’s reputation had preceded her here. Probably the only thing faster than Kangjun.

Hope straightened up to all her short height. “My name is Hope Delgado. I don’t like being called ghost woman any more than you like being called a meteorologist.”

With that, she went into the empty shower stall. Never argue with someone tired of heavy gravity. She just didn’t care.

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe

Writing in Public, Story 4 (Novella), Chapter 7

[image error]CHAPTER 7

Hope wanted to go see the rock from space right away after breakfast, but Mel insisted she stay and rest.

“First day is always bad,” Mel said. “Best to take it easy.”

Hope would have objected, but her upper back had added to her aches. She stretched out on her drop bed, thinking she would never go to sleep with bright daylight outside. And then she woke up, and the sun had gotten lower in the sky.

The sound of cards being shuffled made her roll over. Brooks was sitting on his bed, laying out cards in a solitaire pattern. “I woke up about half an hour ago. I work with the Marines in the weapons training room and I still feel like I went two rounds with a heavy-weight boxer and lost.”

Hope wished she felt that good.

“Mrs. Graul brought crackers,” Brooks said. “I think they’re locally made.”

“She’s Ms. Hagen,” she said.

“Shut up, you two,” muttered Jian’s voice from the drop bed way in the back.

Hope worked herself upright. Bully for her. She eyed the plate of crackers. Brooks had parked a plastic supply box like a nightstand near her drop bed. The crackers were irregularly shaped—rustic, all they chefy shows would have called them. She bit into one. Harder than Earth’s commercially made crackers. Nutty. Lot of salt. Probably why Mel had given it to her.

She had nearly finished off all the crackers by the time Mel returned.

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long,” Hope said.

“It’s only been a few hours,” Mel said. “The days are much shorter. Dr. Sanger said he would take us to the meteorite.”

Despite how Hope felt, she was looking forward to seeing a real live meteorite. She and Dr. Sanger took the front seat of an old-style jeep, and Mel, Jian, and Brooks jammed into the backseat. It hardly looked big enough for the three of them. Brooks had his knees up to his chest.

“You sure you’re okay?” she asked, thinking she wouldn’t like being squished.

“Story of the military,” Brooks said gamely. “Make your buddy smile.”

Dr. Sanger was younger than Hope expected, closer to her age. For some reason, she’d had a picture in her head of a white-haired man in his sixties. Sanger had a mop of brown hair with silver streaks coming in. Loose-fitting white button down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, khaki cargo pants with extra large pockets. The pockets bulged heavily…equipment maybe?

Mel passed around bottles of water to the GALCOM visitors, as well as bags of the crackers. “Make sure you drink plenty of water. Your body is working harder in the heavy gravity so you’re going to sweat more.”

Hope grimaced. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll be peeing every five minutes.” But she nibbled on crackers and washed it down with the water.

Sanger turned the key in the ignition. The jeep coughed twice, then started. Despite the sand being so fat, it was bumpy ride that jarred all of Hope’s aching joints.

“It’s bad while you’re acclimating,” Sanger said. “When I first got here, I drank so much water that my feet swelled right out of my shoes. Dr. Zuver had to loan me one of his pairs. But worse if you don’t drink enough.”

The diesel exhaust was giving Hope a headache. “Why the jeep? Wouldn’t an air car be faster?”

“It’s the sand,” Sanger said. “Gets into everything, even anything that’s supposed to be sealed. The jeep might be old-fashioned, but it was made to drive around in environments like this. And most of us can fix it.”

The meteorite was about two miles away. They drove past that strange, pointy rock Hope had seen from the air. It stuck up out of the ground like a spear at an angle. The texture reminded her of the stucco houses that were popular all over Lower California, except that the color was similar to the sand. She could picture an animal like a goat taking the steep climb up to check out the world. Not that there was much to see. Everything around the rock was flat sand. Wouldn’t take much for her to get disoriented. She didn’t realize how much she used visual references until she didn’t have any.

“You really see ghosts?” Sanger asked, quite tentative.

“Runs in my family,” Hope said.

“You make a lot of money doing that?”

Hope snorted. “As a GALCOM subject matter expert, yes. Before, I was more broke then dirt.”

No one had wanted her around. They feared that she would summon ghosts on them, or try to gouge the desperate, or even that she was a witch. The fear was the worst, because people often covered the fear with anger, and angry people could be dangerous.

Mel leaned forward. “How does it work? The ghosts I mean?”

Brooks laughed. “They appear and start talking to her. Sometimes you can feel them.”

“If they want to be felt,” Hope added. “Felix—Captain Lopez is like that. If Colonel Graul does something Felix disapproves of, he makes the bug bots crazy.”

“Captain Lopez? Who’s that?”

“The first skipper of the Kangjun,” Brooks said. “He was killed in the line of duty.”

“He hangs around to make sure everyone cares for the ship proper,” Hope asked.

Sanger shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re having a conversation about ghosts.”

Hope tried to shrug. That was too hard to do. “You can believe in ghosts or not. Doesn’t matter to me. I know what I see.”

The meteorite was definitely not a ghost. Hope saw it long before the jeep arrived, a black rock sticking up out of the sand like a thumb. She could also see why the meteor scientists were out in such a desolate place. The meteorite was the only rock out here.

Sanger stopped the jeep about ten feet from the meteorite and turned off the ignition. Silence immediately fell, starting Hope.

“Holy cow,” Brooks said.

This close, it was incredible. It was around four feet high. The surface was all shiny and covered with puckers like someone had pressed a thumb into wet clay. That was from the journey down from space and all the heat. There might have been a crater around it when it landed, but the sand had already filled in the space.

“What did it sound like when it crashed?” Hope asked.

“We thought something blew up,” Sanger said.

“Can I touch it?”

“Probably not a good idea, Miss Hope. It’s been baking in the sun all day. Be pretty hot.”

“See any ghosts?” Jian asked.

“Nope. But maybe there’s ghost stuff on the rock.”

Sanger’s eyebrows tried to crawl into his hair. “Ghost stuff?”

“Sometimes ghosts leave a residue. Of sorts. It’s pretty hazardous.”

There had been so many Corellian ghosts on one world that the energy from the ghosts had caused everyone to kill themselves. Hope hadn’t realized until she saw that why everyone in her family committed suicide.

“Hazardous?” Sanger gulped.

She gathered that he had been touching the meteorite.

“Sorry,” she added. “Hazardous in large quantities.”

She rotated in the seat, letting her feet dangle. She slid forward, then dropped down. And pitched forward, smacking her cheek into the hot sand.

Sanger bounced out of the jeep and bounded around to Hope. He grabbed her under the arms, trying to pick her up.

She smacked at his arms. Given the heavy gravity, it wasn’t very hard. “Stop that. I’m not a two year old.”

He let her go and stepped back, confused.

“Offer her your hand,” Brooks said. Wise man.

Sanger helped her to her feet. Her legs were already shaking, so she leaned against the jeep. The side panels were hot!

She lurched forward, nearly losing her balance again, sand kicking around her feet because it was too hard to pick them up. She heard the others getting out of the jeep to follow and trying to be quiet. Brooks was the only one who trudged forward to join her.

“You don’t need to be quiet on my account,” she called over her shoulder. “Ghosts don’t care.”

She circled around the rock, her hand outstretched. Not touching it, but close enough she should be able to tell if there was any residue. Brooks caught her arm as she lost her balance, keeping her from falling into the meteorite.

But there was no ghost residue. She wished she knew if that meant there was no ghost or it had all been burned off coming through the atmosphere. The problem with being an expert is everyone expected her to know everything. She wished she did.

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe

Writing in Public #4 (Novella) Chapter 6

[image error]CHAPTER 6

By the time Graul got done with an inspection of the engine room, lunch had ended an hour ago and his stomach was growling unhappily at him. He headed over to the mess deck because it was closer. Though the crowds had mostly cleared out, the chatter of voices and clatter of pans wore on him, especially after being in the noisy engine room.

A tray in hand, he wove between the tables, greeting people as he passed by. He sat down at the officer’s table against the back bulkhead, marked with a blue table cloth. None of the new officers came to this mess deck, preferring to stay in the officer’s mess. Graul alternated between both, more so since the collision.

One of the bugs bots crawled along the base of the bulkhead, checking for weaknesses in the ship and reporting findings to the computer. He wasn’t sure who in GALCOM had decided to design the foot-long bugs as ants—it made the ship look like it was infested.

While Graul ate his chili and rice (and eyed his ice cream, debating desert first), he used the table top computer access to call up the dashboards of the ship’s systems.

He was so busy reading the monitors that he didn’t notice Marotta walk up to his table until she said, “Those two do not go together.”

She nodded to the chili and the ice cream.

“Ice cream goes with everything,” Graul informed her loftily. “Especially when it’s chocolate. Do you want to join me?”

“Sure, sir. I’ll be right back.”

She returned a few minutes later with a big salad. The salad had been pushed in on the edge of the plate for a scoop of macaroni salad.

“You’re trying to guilt trip me,” he said, frowning.

“No. I had it on good authority the chili is spicy. Hope’s been a bad influence on the cooks. Spicy is not passing this woman’s lips.”

“It’s not that bad,” Graul said, though he hadn’t really noticed. That probably wasn’t good. He closed the dashboard screen, and the computer returned the tabletop to its normal appearance.

Marotta speared a romaine lettuce leaf and added red onion slice. “With respect, sir, when you take lunch, you should take lunch. Not try to do ten other things. We can’t have you burning out.”

He sighed. “You’re right. It’s just been difficult because the new officers are so inexperienced.”

What he really wanted to do was complain–no, bitch–about the minions treatment of him. They’d effectively stalled all the paperwork coming out of the ship, regardless of how it was hurting the enlisted. And he’d heard plenty at the repair facility, with his peers openly telling him that he wasn’t qualified for space command and needed to get a clue.

But bitching would look bad on him, and besides, it wouldn’t do him any good. Probably wouldn’t even make him feel better.

Best to switch away from that subject.

“How’s the crew handling the storm?” he asked. “Any problems?”

Marotta picked up a forkful of the macaroni salad. A lone macaroni escaped and plopped on the table. She scooped it up and put it in her mouth.

“Five second rule,” she said. “The storm is requiring additional monitoring of the systems. It is tiring, so I’ve been running shorter shifts for the people directly affected.”

“So if I see you cursing, it’s the duty rosters?”

Those were the bane of Marotta’s job. Trying to deal with the complex duty schedules for nearly two thousand people was worse than a juggler tackling swords.

“It’s not too many,” she said.

“Fifty is a lot,” he said. At her sharp glance, he added, “C’mon. You know you can’t keep a secret like that.”

The moment he said the S word, he regretted it.

Marotta homed in on it. “Secret, huh huh, sir. You’re one to talk. Why the big secret about your wife?”

“It’s not a secret,” Graul said. “It’s just–we don’t tell anyone. Mel’s not exactly an officer’s wife.”

“That,” Marotta said, “does not make sense.”

Graul finished off his chili and pulled the bowl of ice cream closer. He wiped his spoon off on the napkin. Marotta was right. Chili would not taste good with ice cream.

“GALCOM is still pretty old fashioned when it comes to the roles of officers’ wives,” he said. “I didn’t get married until I was thirty. Which my chain of command reminded me continuously about. When I did get married, they reminded me that Mel had her own duty to serve with the other wives. There were certain…expectations.”

Marotta arched her eyebrows. “Expectations?”

Graul scooped up ice cream, stopping to enjoy the taste. There really wasn’t anything better than ice cream.

“That she was supposed to support my career at the expense of anything herself. She was dirtside then and grudgingly went to this wives event after my command dropped bricks about it. She’d been to over thirty planets at that point and brokered some pretty important deals. None of the wives had been off-planet. Since I was a junior officer then, she was expected to volunteer for everything.”

Marotta winced. “What did she do?”

Graul chuckled. “She’s a pretty good negotiator. She steered it away from her. But when she came back, she told me she wasn’t about to make and serve coffee at events for—’her words—’a bunch of nattering busybodies.’ So after that, when everyone circled back to me about her, I told them she was on standby to be deployed. It was true, but…” He shook his head. “The male spouses don’t get treated the same way.”

“We have similar problems on the enlisted side. The male spouses actually don’t get much respect. Everyone’s like ‘we don’t know what to do with you.’ But it’s hard anyway. I’ve been divorced three times. They all say they can deal with the space travel and then they can’t. How long have you been married?”

“Eighteen years.”

“That is a long time for a spacer.”

Graul’s officer face went up instinctively. He suspected at one point Mel had been thinking of divorcing him. He’d been a mess after the Crying Planet disaster, and she’d put up with a lot.

But Marotta was on another track. “What do you do different?”

It caught Graul so off guard, he dropped his officer face. “We send message drops to each other every day. Just talk about our day.” His tone became wistful. “It’s hard though being so far apart all the time.”

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe

Adventures Around the Web July 22-28, 2017

The Washington, DC heat finally cooled down this week.  I went to a company summer social with a Hawaiian theme. It turned out that research I did for one of my books, Rogue God, came in handy.  We played a game to guess what the term was, and I knew all the terms.  Our team won!  Usually I’m on the one that loses, so that’s kind of cool.

VettoCEO

http://www.vettoceo.org/

Someone at the social asked about the workshop I’m taking, so I thought I’d post it here.  It’s on how to start your own business from the perspective of a veteran and the government benefits that veterans business owners can take advantage of.  It’s free and about 2 hours and 30 minutes of time a week.  Not as good for fiction writers, since a lot of the funding discussion and benefits doesn’t apply, but still a lot of good stuff.  I found that I knew quite a bit from my classes on the next resource.

Dean Wesley Smith

Making a Living with Your Writing

This is an excellent resource.  It’s specifically for writers who want to write full time, written by a writer who has written full time for years.  This is the classic workshop, so you can do the videos in your own time and work through the lessons.

Ian Harvey on The Vintage News

A group of 400-year-old petroglyphs emerges from beneath the beach sand of Hawaii

Ooh!  This is like finding lost treasure.  Can you imagine being the person who discovered these?

Heather VanMouwerik on GradHacker

Organize Your Computer With Help From an Archivist

Being an indie writer, I’ve found organizing the sheet number of files a challenge.   I’ve looked at other sites and books about how to organize the files, but the structure seems to be how that writer organizes their files–not necessarily a good system.  This one is purely organic, and all up to the individual.  Since I’ve done it, I’ve never had problems finding files.

Gucci

Gucci Fall Winter 2017 Campaign: Gucci and Beyond | Director’s Cut

Despite being an ad, this video was too cool to pass up.  The music comes from the Space: 1999 TV series, the style from UFO.  But there’s bits of Star Trek in there as well.  Just thoroughly enjoyable!

 

 

Filed under: Thoughts

Writing in Public Story #4 (Novella), Chapter 5

[image error]CHAPTER 5

Over a late breakfast in the shuttle, Mel briefed the three travelers from Kangjun on the situation. They gathered around in the first three seats, and Mel brought in one of the collapsible chairs to sit in front.

The meal came from a cook Mel had brought along and was simple: Hearty oatmeal studded with sunflower seeds and a plate of sliced fruit, orange with red streaks like a sunburst.

“That’s a local fruit,” Mel said. “It’s okay for humans to eat.”

Hope thought that Mel had arranged this meal because of her. Oatmeal did not require anything beyond a spoon and the fruit could be handled with her fingers. She wasn’t sure if she could manage a fork. Just chewing the soft, sticky fruit took an enormous amount of effort. It was like she was counting her bites in slow motion.

But before Hope scoop up a bite of oatmeal, the spoon fell out of her hand, clattering to the deck. Brooks gamely handed her another one, but it, too, joined its mate. At this rate, she was going to starve.

“Use your fingers, Hope,” Mel said. “I’ve been to over one hundred planets. You can get all the heavy gravity training you need and fingers still work best for the first few days.”

Brooks and Jian exchanged glances, then set aside their spoons and dug in with their fingers. Hope felt better. At least she wasn’t the only one who felt like she was two and hadn’t mastered eating utensils.

“The scientists are here to study meteor falls,” Mel said. “The terrain is relatively rock free, so it makes it easy to find the meteorites. There are three comets that go through the system and drop meteors. Make sure you get the terms right, though. Dr. Zuver will lecture you for an hour if you don’t. Meteorite is on the ground, and meteor is the shooting star. Meteoroid is out in space.”

Hope was never going to remember that. “Maybe I’ll call them rocks from space.”

Brooks passed her a bottle of water with a straw in the opening. Bless him. No lifting required. She sipped the cool water.

“Did the aliens have any problems with the scientists?” Jian asked.

“No, not in the beginning,” Mel said. “They didn’t get why the scientists were studying the meteorites. In their opinion, they know how the galaxy was formed, so why study rocks? But they find humans curious…we apparently taste different.”

Hope blinked. “Taste? They aren’t going to put us in a big pot and cook us in a soup are they?”

Even the tasting part had Brooks and Jian looking faintly uneasy.

But it startled a laugh from Mel. “The aliens have taste buds on their fingers. They communicate through taste.”

Hope tried to picture how that was possible. It made her head hurt worse than the gravity.

“Okay,” she said, “but if I see a big pot, I’m running.”

“What changed?” Jian asked. “Did our scientists actually do anything wrong?”

Mel ate a spoonful of oatmeal and wiped her lips with a napkin. “Not that I can tell. Dr. Sanger is pretty easy going—gets along with everyone. Dr. Lewis can stand her own with the men, even Dr. Zuver. And he’s the kind of person who gets into science so he doesn’t have to deal with people. But all of them are interested in the rocks. They only go into town—about twenty miles away—if they need supplies, and Sanger and Lewis handle that.”

Brooks glanced at Hope. “You’re likely to have problems with all of them.”

Hope sniffed. “No, I’m not going to have problems with them. They’re going to have problems with me. I don’t care if ghosts can’t be scientifically proven.”

“Who called Alien Affairs?” Jian asked.

“Dr. Zuver, believe it or not,” Mel said. “He just wanted to work, and the aliens were fretful about the meteorite and the ghost. Apparently he kept telling them ghosts didn’t exist and that didn’t go over well. We get a lot of planet drops for scientific missions. Many of the people who go out to other planets are like Dr. Zuver, and they tend to screw things up by being who they are.”

Hope dragged her finger along the side of the bowl, catching the sunflower seeds that had escaped eating. She was afraid to ask the next question and she needed to.

“Humans have always reacted badly to me,” she said. “Someone came to my family’s house once when I was little with a cross and stakes and thought they were going to kill us. These aliens are already afraid of ghosts. How are they going to react to me?”

Mel didn’t have an answer.

 

Writer’s note:  There will be more chapters, starting on Sunday.  This is book 3 in the GALCOM universe series.   Book 1, Crying Planet, is available.  Book 2, Lonely Planet will be available later in August (still waiting on the copy editor to finish with it).

[image error]

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe

Writing in Public, Story #4 (Novella), Chapter 4

[image error]CHAPTER 4

The planet Hope would be going to was called Planet 1849, which the military promptly nicknamed Forty-Niner. The planet did have an official name, but humans could not pronounce it, so Forty-Niner it was. Hope listened to a recording the aliens pronouncing the name. It sounded like a combination between a hiss and a burp. She couldn’t produce that without being impolite.

From space, the planet looked like a glop of purple paint an artist had forgotten to clean up. Graul had told the landing party before they departed that the planet was on a twenty hour day. Hope’s brains were going to be thoroughly scrambled by the time she got back. Maybe this trip wouldn’t be long.

But ghosties never behaved.

The shuttle ride down to the planet took six hours—two longer than normal. This allowed time for the computer to adjust the gravity gradually so everyone could acclimate. Hope sprawled out on one of the drop beds in the back to let the gravity flow over her and maybe not hurt her lower back so much. At first, she didn’t notice anything and slept through the gravity changes. Then the heavy gravity came in softly at first, wrapping itself around Hope and then working into her muscles. It was like being covered in wet sand and trying to move forward.

She listened to Jian snore—really, officers snored?—as she tried to doze off. Brooks went on the computer to play a game for a little while, judging by the dings, then went to bed, too. She must have gone to sleep, because she woke when the shuttle’s air pressure changed as it equalized to the outside. Jian was combing out her hair, and Brooks had just emerged from the bathroom, a nub of shaving cream behind one ear.

Hope’s hair must be a mess. She rummaged in her bag for a brush. Bending over was hard. Getting back up was harder. Brushing her hair…the hairbrush was like a ten pound weight she was trying to lift to her head. Her arm was shaking. It was only brushing her hair!

“Let me help, Hope.” Jian came over, taking the brush.

“I hate this,” Hope said. She was appalled that she wanted to cry, over a hairbrush.

“It wouldn’t be this bad if we’d had time for the training.”

Jian spent a lot of time brushing out Hope’s hair, reminding her of long ago, when her mother had done that. Before ghosts. It hadn’t been too long after that Hope started seeing ghosts like her father. She’d seen the dismay in her mother’s eyes, and never again had her mother touched her.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Hope asked.

“What bothers me?”

“Ghosts?” Hope said lamely.

“If it bothered me, I wouldn’t have volunteered.”

Jian had just finished putting Hope;s hair into a French braid when the pilot announced that they would be landing soon. Jian and Brooks returned to their seat. Hope dragged herself to the window. In spite of how tired the gravity was already making her, she wanted a first look at the new planet.

It was early morning out, with the sun just poking its head above the horizon. No clouds at all. Purple-red sand rushed past below. A desert. Not like the ones she always saw on streaming, with those perfect, graceful sand dunes. This was flat sand.

As the shuttle banked, the strangest thing she had seen came into view. A twin line of metal barrels cut across the sand, stretching as far as she could see.

Jian peered over her shoulder. “That’s a road.”

A dust cloud kicked up on the barrel road up ahead, trailing by an old-style jeep. There were two people in the front seat of the jeep, but the shuttle was too high up to tell much more. The barrel road curved around, headed past a stand of rectangular canvas tents. Nearby, a giant triangular shaped stone poked up out of the ground like a finger. A GALCOM shuttle was parked near the stone, a canvas awning over the entrance to keep the sun off. A pair of collapsible chairs sat out in front.

The shuttle slowed, coming to a stop in mid-air, then descended. It was about three hundred yards from the tent. The landing gear thumped as it touched the ground.

“We’re clear,” called one of the pilots.

Brooks came over to Hope’s seat. “How you doing, Shrimp Woman?”

“Oh, yeah,” Hope said. “Heavy gravity is a very special thing.”

“If you need to stop and sit, just do it,” Jian said. “It was awful when I fist started training with the Marines. They’re hardcore. I was trying to keep up with them, and then my legs said, ‘Nope, I’m done.’ I went right on my butt and couldn’t get up again.”

“It’s easy to overdo it,” Brooks added. “Your body will make you pay for it.”

“And we’ll be watching you,” Jian said. “The Marines knew what was going to happen to me and let it happen.”

“That’s not fair,” Hope said.

“It was so that I would recognize when I needed to stop. But it was hard to tell the first few times until I’d gone too far. Better in training than down here.”

Hope gave Brooks the evil eye. “Would you have done that to me?”

He raised his hands in horror. “No. I’m not that stupid.”

The door controls thumped, and then light spilled in as the door opened. Along with came the heavy heat already starting into the day and the worst stink. There must be a latrine somewhere nearby that was festering in the heat.

The pilot came to the cockpit door. “Ma’am, someone’s already approaching.”

Jian returned to her seat. “Might as well stay put. Let them do the work.”

A knock on the outside of the shuttle announced the arrival of their visitor.

“Permission to come aboard,” called a woman’s voice.

A familiar woman’s voice. It had been months, but…

“Permission granted,” Jian called.

Mel Hagen stuck her head inside the doorway. She was dressed in a CTU, gone to purple red with the sand color, and a Boonie hat with a floppy brim. Her long blond hair was pulled back in a pony tail. She must be using an electronic sun blocker, because she had no tan despite having been here for a while.

Both Jian and Brooks were staring at Hope, who was trying to hide.

“What’s wrong?” Brooks asked.

Jian glanced at Mel, then grinned. “So you’re the skipper’s wife.”

Brooks eyes went very wide.

“He doesn’t know you’re down here, ma’am,” Jian said. “All we got from GALCOM was the request. There was someone else assigned to this mission.”

Mel pulled herself up into the shuttle, making it look easy. It was a big step up.

“Their ship was struck by a meteor, and they had to put into port for repairs,” she said. “I was on my way back from one and nearby, so we were diverted here. Probably better anyway. Neil’s pretty inflexible. He wouldn’t have understood what the problem was.”

“What is the problem?” Jian asked. “We did not get much information from Admiral Terzian.”

“Does it have to do with the ghost?” Hope asked.

“Yes, it does,” Mel said. “The locals think that the scientists called the meteorite with the ghost to the planet.”

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe, science fiction

Writing in Public: Story #4 (Novella), Chapter 3

CHAPTER [image error]3

The new shift for the bridge had already settled in for their watch when Graul strode in. His eyes lingered on each of the duty stations, feeling a slight tension in the air. The geomagnetic storm unpredictability required the crew to spend extra effort to monitor systems. The shields should be protect the ship well enough, but Graul had already learned that sometimes GALCOM’s standard procedures didn’t work in non-standard situations.

“Captain on the bridge!” someone to his left called.

“At ease,” Graul said.

He headed for the island in the center of the room, the plot table. Marotta was already there. Lieutenant Commander Jian, Graul’s executive officer, stood next to her. Jian’s black hair was blunt cut at chin length, very practical for ship duty.

Both women were watching a three-dimensional image projected by the computer above the table. It showed a filtered image of the planet’s sun. A fissure had opened up in the atmosphere, and it was spewing fiery tendrils. It was mesmerizing, beautiful, and deadly.

Graul folded his arms across his chest. “How’s the ship handling the storm, Commander?”

Jian straightened up. “We’re buttoned up pretty good, sir. The only thing we’re having trouble with is communications.”

Graul sighed. “If we could delay, I would. We’re going to be out of communications with the landing party. If they run into trouble…”

Hell, every time Hope went somewhere, they ran into trouble. He was still trying to figure out if it was Hope or the ghosts.

“Maybe we can send an officer down,” Jian suggested.

Graul mentally reviewed all the names of his officers. He’d lost nearly all of them during the spaceship collision months ago, so everyone but Jian was new. Because of interference from those angry at his promotion, he’d also got green officers. Most of them didn’t even have space wings—how did officers not get those?

Before he opened his mouth, Marotta interrupted him with abject horror.  “No! You can’t go dirtside. Sir.”

Graul gave her a smile. “Get captured by aliens once and no one forgets. No, with this storm, my place is here. Besides, I’m definitely not up on heavy gravity myself. I doubt if any of the new officers are either.”

“I am, sir,” Jian said.

Graul glanced at her.

“It was Hope’s fault, indirectly,” Jian said.

“Yes, blame Hope,” he said, but his tone was teasing. Hope’s presence had changed the dynamics of the crew in ways that he hadn’t expected.

“She started all that exercising in the gym. I saw her changing things up, and I realized I was bored with what I was doing. So I joined the Marines during their heavy gravity training.”

“Hoo-ah.”

“Ooh-rah,” she corrected.

Marotta sniffed. “The Marines do it better.”

“Well, yeah,” Graul said. “There’s no one like the Marines. How long have you been training, Commander?”

“Since we were at the repair facility,” Jian said. “It’s just been once a week, so it’s not as intensive as what Hope has been receiving.”

But it was a lot longer.

“The only thing, sir.” Jian hesitated. “I’m not really familiar with the Department of Alien Affairs. I looked them up—”

“But it was decidedly unhelpful,” Graul said, nodding.

He thought the entry in the GALCOM database had been written by lawyers to hide what DAA did. He debated telling them what he did know, which was a whole lot more than what most GALCOM officers even knew…and he still didn’t know that much.

“They handle disputes with governments,” he said. “Not what we see, where someone gets drunk and gets stupid and ends up on the wrong end of the alien law. No, these are usually bigger issues that involve alien governments. I served on a military passenger transport, and we had to do an emergency pick up for Alien Affairs. The planet’s government was threatening to go war with GALCOM over a trade dispute.”

“What happened?” Jian asked.

“Alien Affairs found out that the government was not being entirely honest. They were dealing with the Lysians.”

“Was that before or after the ban?” Marotta asked.

The Lysians were banned on all GALCOM worlds because they traded everything, but particularly liked humans for slave labor. Anyone taken as a slave didn’t survive more than four weeks. The Lysians thought of them as tools, to be used and discarded.

“It caused the ban,” Graul said.

Jian rested her hips against the plot table. “So is this the person who did you a favor at the repair facility…the mysterious M?”

Right. Graul had showed Jian the note Mel had sent him at the repair station.

“That was a woman’s handwriting,” Jian said.

“Oh, you have to tell,” Marotta said, clearly smelling blood in the water.

Graul didn’t want to tell. He didn’t want his personal life tracked all over the ship and back. This crew gossiped worse than any other ship he’d been on, and most of it was about him!

Marotta crowded closer. “Sir, we will not leave you alone until you tell.”

Worse, they’d do it. And there were ears everywhere. This conversation would be all over the ship, and probably already was and everyone would be guessing about the mysterious woman. He did not want them thinking he’d had an affair. That would give the minions too much fire power.

The only thing he could do to have any semblance of control over the rumors was to tell the truth.

“My wife works for Alien Affairs. She was the mediator we picked up. That was how we met.”

It had been his first posting as an officer. Lord, he’d been so terribly young. Mel had thought so, too and hadn’t been interested in the only single officer on the ship. It hadn’t been until they met again two years later that she’d taken an interest in him.

He could see it in Marotta’s eyes, all the pieces coming together.

“That’s why you asked about the name,” she said. “But Hope … wait, Hope knew? And we didn’t? Why did Hope get to know?”

“That is a good question,” Graul said. “And I wish I knew the answer. Neither one of them will tell me.”

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe, science fiction

Writing in Public: Story #4 (Novella), Chapter 2

[image error]CHAPTER 2

Hope did not expect to have an escort to Colonel Graul’s executive conference room. Marotta came along with her, walking faster than Hope’s much shorter legs. She felt like one of those toy dogs trying to keep up with a human. But then Marotta stopped at the K-tube, which Hope had never ridden on. Kangjun was so big that it had a train that circled the entire ship. Hope had wondered about it, but she was a civilian, so she thought she wasn’t supposed to use it.

The tube was crowded and stuffy with crew on their way to their shifts. Space moisturizer, aftershave, and perfume all mingled with Hope’s nose, making it itch.

Marotta tapped the wall for the computer panel. “Executive conference room.”

Evidently it wasn’t on the normal stops.

The alarm sounded, and the doors slid closed. The train began to move. Hope lurched, falling against Marotta. The chief gave her an expression of utter disdain. Hope would have grabbed a handhold, but she was too short to reach them. No one had made these Hope-sized. She reached behind her, trying to grab a vertical pole and got someone’s arm.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

The train at last slowed, and the computer announced, “Executive conference room.”

Marotta shot out of the train and Hope had to run to keep up. She was still trying to figure out what was so important when the two women entered the room.

The executive conference room was Graul’s domain, a luxurious suite where he was skipper, negotiator, and bad guy all rolled into one. Hope was getting used to it, slowly, but it always reminded her of a five star hotel: Plush royal blue carpets, big picture windows showing the space outside, and even a suit of armor standing at attention. Graul was seated at the coffee table near the picture windows. His CTU had changed color to match the blue sofa.

Graul was in his late forties, with hair going to gray. Not as tall as Brooks, but lithe and broad-shouldered. He had the whole officer thing going on, keeping his face as neutral as possible so no one could read what he was thinking. He was also the first Army skipper in all of GALCOM, and a lot of people weren’t happy with that. Hope had heard a lot of nattering about it while Kangjun had been had the repair facility for two months to fix damage to the hull. Graul called the natterers minions.

“Sir,” Marotta said.

Graul’s eyes flicked to Hope, lingering on the ugly looking bruise on her arm. She had another one on the back of her leg and more under the tank top. “That from the heavy gravity training, Ms. Delgado?”

Now Hope wished she’d worn something that covered more up.

“I’m having trouble keeping my balance, sir,” she said, feeling like it was a lame excuse.

But the smile he gave her was sympathetic. “I’m sorry about that. We normally have sixty days at least for training. We had the bad luck to be only ten days away. I asked Admiral Terzian if we could delay thirty days, but he turned me down. You’ve gotten stuck with the crash course. Chief, make sure she gets those bruises tended to before she goes dirtside.”

“Yes, sir,” Marotta said.

Graul tapped the table top for access to the bridge. “Any luck with communications to the planet?”

“Patching it through now, Skipper,” answered a voice that Hope recognized as Graul’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Jian. “Connection’s bad. We’re still having problems with the geomagnetic storm.”

The image sprang up over the coffee table. Hope and Marotta sat down across from Graul to get a better look at it. The image was hard to see. Normally the images were clear, three-dimensional, like a ghost, but with real people. But this one crackled and lines split through it like broken glass. Spots appeared and disappeared. In the background, it looked like the sun had set.

A man slid into the seat. It looked like he’d forgotten to shave that morning because his cheeks were covered with gray stubble. He was probably in his sixties and hadn’t bothered with getting his eyes fixed. He had a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on and adjusted them, squinting at the image.

“Yes?” he said.

Graul frowned, thrown off by the man’s appearance. He must have been expecting military personnel. “This is Colonel Graul from the S.C. Kangjun. Admiral Terzian said you needed assistance with a…problem.”

Marotta took a corner of the table top to access the computer, her fingers doing a dance across the screen.

“Oh that.” The man pushed up at his glasses again and leaned closer.

“Dr Zuver,” Marotta murmured.

Graul nodded his thanks. “Dr. Zuver, can we talk to the Alien Affairs people?”

“Not here. Call later.” Zuver reached forward, and the image vanished.

Graul blinked and sat back, outrage and disbelief rising in his voice. “We’ve been trying to reach them for seven days.”

“Who’s Dr. Zuver?” Hope asked. “He a medical doctor?”

“No. He—” Marotta squinted at the computer screen, then shook her head. “Can’t pronounce that. He studies meteors.”

“From what little I got from Admiral Terzian,” Graul said, “there’s a haunted meteorite.”

It was Hope’s turn to blink and think about that. An image popped into her head of a ghost riding a flaming meteor like a bucking bronco. Did meteors have saddles?

She couldn’t help it: she was smiling. “Sorry, sir. I think I’ve been working out in heavy gravity too much. I’m gravity-crazy.”

Graul shook his head before she finished speaking. “I thought it sounded about as crazy as you did. The request originated from Alien Affairs. They don’t call anyone else in unless they really need assistance.”

Hope struggled to hide a smile. “Who’s handling it from Alien Affairs?”

That was enough to earn her a strange look from Marotta, because it wasn’t a question anyone would normally expect. Hope wouldn’t be familiar with with any of the Alien Affairs people, except for one. Which was why Graul looked like he’d swallowed a bug.

His wife, Melanie “Mel” Hagen, worked for the GALCOM’s Department of Alien Affairs. Hope had met her while Kangjun was docked at the repair facility. For whatever reason Graul was none too happy that Hope knew about Mel.

“Neil Haverstad,” Graul said, a little too promptly. Yup, he had looked it up.

Marotta looked from Graul to Hope. “So you two want to tell me what’s going on?”

Graul and Hope spoke at the same time. She said “No.” He said, “There’s nothing going on.”

Yes, it was just such a good idea to make everyone curious.

Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: science fiction

The Importance of Writing Every Day

Writers get admonished all the time about writing every day, like if they don’t do something, it’s a terrible sin.

But the reason for it is simple: It has to be done every day so the habit will stick.

If there’s no habit, it’s easy to drop off it when life gets in the way.

And then months, or even years pass.

And it is hard to do starting out. It can take years to build the habit.

When I worked with a cowriter, it took 2-3 years to write one book. We primarily wrote on the weekends, probably produced a thousand words, finished, then revised the book. We started submitting to an agent, and I told cowriter that we needed to learn how to write a book faster. If we got a contract, we were probably going to get a year deadline.

He poo-pooed it, saying everything was negotiable. I was horrified. I envisioned myself struggling at the last minute to produce a book while he didn’t participated. It hit me that writing wasn’t even on his priority list.

But it needed to be on mine. We parted company, and I tried to write every day.

It didn’t always happen, but I was able to do it most days of the week. Some days I didn’t produce much. Some days I produced a lot. And there were days where I just needed to do something else. It wasn’t perfect, which was okay.

At the end of February, I broke my foot. It was a clean break and didn’t need any surgery (yay!). It was my right foot, so I couldn’t drive. I did medical telework for 10 weeks.

[image error]

I could not believe how tired I was! The first week it was all I could do to get through the day just for work. Writing? Not happening.

I finished work, and then I went to sleep for two hours (in hindsight, I should have done half-days for the first few weeks, but really, I’d never broken any bone before so I didn’t know what to expect).

But every day, I missed the habit of going to my computer and writing something. So when my foot came out of the boot for good, I allowed for about two weeks of being tired, and then I started writing again.

Filed under: productivity, Writing Tagged: Habits