Cameron Cooper's Blog, page 16
November 25, 2021
Thanksgiving sale on Kobo, including HAMMER AND CRUCIBLE
If you shop at Kobo (and I shop anywhere there’s a sale!), and you’re in Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia or New Zealand, then you might want to pop over to Kobo and check out their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. Look for the banners at the top of the site, mentioning the sale.
Hammer and Crucible is part of the sale. You can find it here, on Kobo.
Enjoy your browsing!
PS: Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US!
November 18, 2021
First Chapter of Hammer And Crucible
We’re two weeks away from the release of the Imperial Hammer series, and as usual, today I’m providing the first chapter, complete and unedited, in the upcoming release. And that’s Hammer and Crucible, which is book 1 of the series.
Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM HAMMER & CRUCIBLE
COPYRIGHT © CAMERON COOPER 2020
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
1
The Umb Judeste, Beyond The Inner Elbow.
Stellar barges are generally runby family corporations. Mine, The Umb Judeste, belongs to Carranoak Inc. I hold a razor-thin majority of shares, so technically, the barge is mine. The irony of that struck me as I laid on steel decking, staring up at dazzling daylights, my jaw on fire. I had been slugged right on the corner of the jaw, in a near-perfect roundhouse swing, by the only member of the Carranoak family who could claim a second degree relationship to me.
Until that moment, I hadn’t known she was on the barge. Perfect fucking greeting.
I had come down to the main concourse when I heard a supply frigate had emerged through the gate and was coupled to the Judeste. Supply ships provide a break from the routine. There’s always something interesting on them, even if it was only the communications squirt which comes along for the ride when a ship used the gate. Current gossip is addictive, especially when you haven’t got much else to do.
I stood at the edge of the swirl of new people carrying sacks or briefcases, or nothing. Some stared at the signposts for directions. Judeste personnel plucked travelers out of the stream and took them away. Others were regular visitors who strode off, confident of their direction.
I got startled looks and second glances as the arrivals passed by. I was used to it and ignored it.
One of the junior pursers, Jimmy, spoke to a tall woman with wheat colored hair which matched mine—or, I should say, mine as it used to be. She was tall, had a small sack over one shoulder, a military bearing and civilian clothes. Jimmy turned and pointed at me.
That got me curious. I waited as the woman wound her way through the milling arrivals. As she drew closer, I realized it wasn’t just the hair which was similar. She came right up to me with a fast, long-legged stride, her face working. At the last second, I realized who she was.
Before I could open my mouth, she swung her fist. “Double-timing broad!” she ground out as her punch landed. I dropped heavily. Of course I did. I figure it’s been sixty years since I’d last taken one in the face. The old bones have turned brittle since then.
As everyone lingering in the arrival area formed a loose circle around us, muttering to each other with delighted horror, I pressed my fingers against the tender spot and wondered if my jaw had dislocated. These days, tripping over my own feet could be fatal. My heart staggered, righted itself and decided to keep ticking for now. The sour taste of adrenaline made me swallow. Swallowing hurt, too.
“Hello, granddaughter,” I croaked.
Juliyana bent and peered at me. Was she waiting for me to get up so she could take another swing? She’d have to live with disappointment.
Her face worked with the fury driving her. The anger checked as she watched me gasping. Her gaze measured me—properly, this time. Her mouth opened. Horror painted her face. “Shit on a shovel…you…you’re old!”
“Not too fucking old to hit, though, right?”
Juliyana propped her hands on her knees, bellowing hard. She was still a Ranger, last I’d heard, so it wasn’t unaccustomed exercise shorting her breath. I’d seen guilt rip the guts of people before, though.
I held up a hand. “Help me up,” I demanded. “Then you can explain to me what the fuck is going on.”
“I thought you were way over on the other side of the empire,” I said to Juliyana as the elevator pod rose up through the levels. We had the pod to ourselves because I’d shooed off everyone who tried to get on it. If I own the joint, I’d use the privileges which came with it. I wanted to be alone for a moment while I put myself back together. An old woman already looks vulnerable. No need to add to the impression.
Juliyana was an exception. Her, I wanted right next to me until I sorted this out.
“You were in the war with the Quintino Rim folk,” I added. Talking was not fun.
“The Quintino offensive ended ten years ago,” Juliyana said stiffly.
I shrugged and pressed my fingers against my jaw once more. I’d ask Andrain to scope the bone, just in case. I was his most consistent patient, these days.
As we passed through the greenhouse levels, Juliyana squeezed the strap of her sack, her throat working. I noticed and stayed silent. The anger would push it out of her. No need to tax myself going after it.
She held onto her tongue until we got off the elevator at my level.
“You’re not at the top?” she asked, surprise lifting her voice, as she peered up and down the blank corridor. Unlike most strangers to the barge, she had correctly named the orientation. Arriving ships always emerged through the gate with the bulk of the barge to their right. The wharf was at the bottom, down by the reaction engines. Ships cruised the length of the barge, all two kilometers of it, to reach their berth. Newts erroneously assumed the irregular, ugly triangular barge was lying down, despite internal gravity running across the ship.
If Juliyana had been a typical newt, she would have asked why I wasn’t at the end of the ship, not the top of it. But then, if she had been a typical newt, she wouldn’t have known the top of the ship was where the senior members of the family lived, and corporate headquarters were located right beneath where the gate attached to the ship like an astronomically sized hook-eye.
Because Juliyana was a Ranger, she was used to quickly orienting herself according to the local gravitational pull, even in strange places. “Up” was always against the pull of gravity. The convention saved officers from handing confusing orders to subordinates.
I stopped myself from being impressed by her grasp of local conventions. “Why should I be at the top?” I asked, as I headed down the corridor. “I’m not the CEO.” I palmed open the door to my apartment and let her in.
I followed, moving stiffly. I went straight over to the printer, clicked though to analgesics, and selected the biggest dose of the strongest meds the terminal would issue me. In response, it demanded my finger. I put my forefinger against the pad, let it draw a drop of blood. That would have Andrain demanding I attend his clinic, for sure. I’d deal with it later. For now, I just wanted to numb my jaw. I guessed there was a lot of talking ahead.
The printer pinched the end of my finger and injected the painkiller.
Juliyana parked herself on the only comfortable chair in the sitting room and stared at the wall. I had it set for a tropical beach. The waves were crystalline clear and made a pleasant background murmur. The sun was hot, and the sand came right up to the edge of the floor.
“Get out of my chair.”
She picked up her sack and stood. I sat down.
Juliyana looked around for another perch. Then she shrugged, put the sack at her feet and straightened.
“Start talking,” I told her.
She stared at me, instead.
“Ten seconds, then I’m paying you back for the punch.”
She blinked. “It’s just…you’re different from how I remember you.”
“I got old. It happens.”
“I’ve never seen it before. Does it…hurt?”
I scowled. “Your ten seconds are up.”
She put a hand on her hip. The hip was just above where the butt of her pistol would normally be. A furrow dug between her brows. I wondered if she was aware of how much she projected her thoughts. She said quickly, “You set up my father. You handed him over to the Imperial Shield.” Her expression darkened and her jaw grew hard. “You got him killed.”
Then, damn it, she wept.
While Juliyana got her shit together, hunched up in my chair, I printed a second armchair. I could afford that much. While it was growing to full size, I printed two random meals, five hundred calories each, and hot. We both needed it.
Juliyana didn’t allow herself more than a moment or two of self-indulgent pity. While I ate, she picked at the contents of the steaming bowl in her lap and gave me an incoherent story about conspiracies and bad intentions and wars and shoddy business practices…it sounded to me like just another day in the empire.
I finished my bowl, surprising myself. Getting knocked to the floor was good for the appetite, apparently. I put the bowl aside and held up my hand. “Stop, stop. Back up and start again.” I drew in a breath and added in my best military tone; “Report, Lieutenant.”
Juliyana colored to her hairline. “It’s Private now, remember?”
I had forgotten.
Yet my command got her turned around properly. She put the bowl on the floor beside the chair and pressed her hands together. “I found a report, don’t ask me where, but I verified the serial number, it’s legit….” Her wrists paled as she pressed harder. Her fingers slid between each other and gripped. “When Noam died, he wasn’t with the Rangers. He was doing something mysterious for the Imperial Shield. And you approved the transfer. You never told me that. You never told anyone.”
I weighed that closely. “That’s because I never approved such a transfer.”
“Or you did, and you’ve forgotten about it since?” she asked. “It was forty-three years ago…and you didn’t remember I was a private, just now.”
“Fair point. Only, being busted back to private is minor—”
“Not to me.” She scowled.
“—while giving up a single Ranger to the Imperial Shield is a blow any colonel would remember. Son, or not,” I added. Work with good soldiers long enough and they all become difficult to transfer out. “Basic cross checking would tell you I wasn’t his CO at the time. It wouldn’t have been me who approved the order.”
“L. Andela, Colonel…it was your chop, Danny.”
“Signatures can be faked.”
She dug in her sack, pulled out a pad and tapped it on, turned it around and shoved it at me.
I peered at the screen. The text was blurry. I waited for my focus to properly kick in and scanned the document. It looked authentic. Only, fakes weren’t useful unless they did look authentic. “What can I say? Someone is jerking you around.” I handed the pad back.
“Doesn’t that bother you, either?” she asked. She scrolled through the pad.
“Truth? No, it doesn’t,” I said tiredly. “What else have you got?”
Juliyana lifted a brow. “Isn’t that enough? Dad was Imperial Shield, on special assignment, when he died—”
“When he went mad, shot up a ship, rammed it into another, and fired nukes at all the others,” I amended. “Then he killed himself. Precision, Private.”
Juliyana swallowed, the furrow returning to her brow. “What if he didn’t go mad at all?”
“I saw the footage,” I told her gently.
That made her pause. She rallied. “What if he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do? What if he was following orders?”
I was too tired to laugh. The poor girl was grasping because living with the stain Noam left behind was hard. So I gave her a bit more rope to tug on. “Why would anyone give such orders?”
She sat forward. “The Imperial fleet was facing down Cygnus Intergenera. No one ever stops to consider that fact when they talk about what Dad did. Cygnus never accepted the Emperor taking control of the gates array at the end of the Crazy Years. The Drakas suit is still in the courts.”
“So?” Although I could already see where she was going with this—the earlier babble had primed me.
“So, by ordering Dad to make it seem like he’d gone mad, the Emperor dealt with Cygnus in a way that didn’t point at him. They had to appeal to the Imperial court after that—they’d been defeated in battle, and the Emperor wasn’t to blame. He made it look good by stripping Dad of all his medals and honors and removing his name from the Ranger roll.” Her voice grew strained.
I cleared my throat. I’d been there for that, after all. “And you think I set my own son up for something like that?” I asked mildly.
Her gaze was steady. “He was working for the Shield,” she insisted. “And you were…well, you weren’t yourself, toward the end. Everyone says so.”
“I didn’t handle Noam’s death very well,” I said in agreement. Now I was the one with the croaky voice. “That was after he died, though.” I rubbed at my temples. Another headache was setting in. “I don’t know why someone would prime you this way, Juli. It doesn’t matter, because I won’t take the bait. I didn’t sign that order. And it was forty-three years ago.”
“And I’ve been stuck in the bowels of drone ships and barges, doing shitwork, ever since!” she cried, leaping to her feet. “When do I get my life back, Danny? When do people forget what he did?”
She was crying again.
I got to my feet. Everything ached. I moved over to the bedshelf and opened it. “It’s late,” I told her. “You need to adjust to local time. Take the bed.” The sun was setting over the sea, turning it pink, while birds dove for their supper.
Juliyana got to her feet, a good soldier obeying orders, although I could see she wanted to argue the point. As she moved past me, I held out my hand. “Give me the pad. I’ll take a look.”
Her face lit up.
So bad at hiding what she was thinking!
She shoved the pad into my hand, rolled onto the cot and sealed it.
I sighed and got to work. I built a table and two chairs, which took up most of the space left in the sitting room. Then I settled at it with a full jug of blue tea. I was going to need it, for the pad was stuffed full of documents and Juli’s notes.
I scanned them, building a rough outline in my mind of what was there. I girded myself and returned to the one document which would dismantle this entire conspiracy she had built in her mind; The orders over my signature.
And yeah, there was a part of me which wondered if I really had forgotten signing those orders. In the last ten years I’ve overlooked and plain missed a lot of things, more of them each year. Andrain says it’s part of the aging process—according to the documentation. For him, I’m a walking experiment. Geriatrics is an almost forgotten realm of medicine.
For me, it’s no experiment. So I put off checking the orders until I thought I was ready to face them. Half a jug of tea was gone by then.
I’m not an archivist. I worked in the combat battalions, not support, but I’ve picked up tricks over the years. I cracked open the underbelly of the document and worked my way through the coding.
Clean and clear. Not a digit or line out of place. It had all the hallmarks of an Imperial document—heavy on code, with shielding, redundancies and fallbacks to preserve the integrity.
I sat back and stared at the moon rising over the sea, sending a white path toward the beach, and considered. I would remember something of this magnitude, surely? Or had I conveniently wiped that section of my memory, too?
There is only one bit of my personal history I can’t remember, and it had nothing to do with Noam, dead or alive. The stuff I forget these days was recent. Events from forty years ago and even further back were clear. Whole. Except for that one dark patch—and I had everyone else’s accounts to cover that.
There was one other thing I could do before I gave in to Juliyana’s paranoia. I dug out a screen emitter and set it up on the table and went through the dozen steps to log into my backdoor on the Rangers archives.
I’m not the only high-ranking officer of the Imperial Rangers Corps to build a backdoor safety net for themselves. I know that, because a senior officer taught me how to do it. There were a thousand reasons why it was a good idea, even though it was against regulations—all of them, for the very first regulation was the declaration that no Ranger ever put himself before the Corps and his fellow Rangers. All other regulations spilled down from that tenet.
Only, I don’t like the idea of an enemy locking me out of my own data. Wars are won or lost by the quality of the information used to build strategies. And if ever the archives were to fall into enemy hands, being able to sneak in where they weren’t looking and wipe the archives was the equivalent of keeping a backup gun and two spare blades under your uniform.
So I used a door I hadn’t cracked open in over fifty years.
The serial number on the document was as genuine as Juliyana had insisted it was. Without that serial number I would never have found the document on the archives. It was buried in strange files in an out-of-the-way corner of the archives. The location made no sense at all. No one would think to look there if they were searching organically or logically.
I opened the document. It looked exactly the same as Juliyana’s copy except for the chop.
G. Dalton, Major.
Gabriel Dalton. Noam’s commanding officer. Which made perfect sense.
I sat back, weak with relief. I hadn’t forgotten, after all.
But shit, damn, fuck it. That meant Juliyana was right: Noam had been working for the Imperial Shield when he died.
What the fuck had he been up to?
The full, best-selling Imperial Hammer series in one set.Binge read the acclaimed space opera series featuring ex-Imperial Ranger Danny Andela and her friends and family, as they face a unique and deadly threat to the Empire, one that will tax their strength, drain their hearts and force them toward a bleak future…
Buy the whole series in this one set and save almost 50% on the cost of buying all of them individually!
It’s full of action from beginning to end. – Reader review.
The Imperial Hammer series:
1.0: Hammer and Crucible
1.1: An Average Night on Androkles
2.0: Star Forge
3.0: Long Live the Emperor
4.0: Severed
5.0: Destroyer of Worlds
5.5: The Imperial Hammer Series Box Set
Space Opera Science Fiction Novel
The Imperial Hammer Series Boxed Set is now available for pre-order. If you buy it directly from me (that is, from Stories Rule Press), you get your copy a week earlier. That is, next week. Not two weeks from now.
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October 30, 2021
20% Off Everything in the Store, 4 Days Only
The end of the month seems to come around more quickly, every single month.
Today is the start of our SRP 4 day only, 20% off everything sale. There are no exceptions. Pre-orders, boxed sets, books already discounted can all be included.
You can shop as often as you want during the four days, and you can pass the coupon code on to other readers if you think they’ll enjoy our stories.
The coupon expires at midnight MDT on November 2nd.
Here’s the coupon code: TTK62W2E
The coupon is not valid anywhere but on the Stories Rule Press site. To start shopping, click here. You can sort and filter the books to narrow down to your preferences.
Enjoy your browsing!
Cam.
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Those Glorious Old Pulp Covers!
If you mention pulp fiction, these days, most younger folk think of the Tarantino movie franchise — and that’s about all that pops up when you search “pulp fiction” on Google.
But pulp fiction also includes the fabulously adventuresome tales that were once published on very cheap woodpulp paper (hence the name), featuring artwork that is so stylistic and unique, that it instantly brands any story or magazine with that style of cover.
Just a sample!
If you know your SF history at all, you know that most of the classic SF authors got their start in the pulps, including Asimov, Heinlein, and a slew of others, including some who never really left the pulps, including Winston K. Marks (who is a fun read, even these days).
If you search for SF pulp authors, you’d get a who’s who of classic SF.
It wasn’t just SF where the pulps reigned for decades, either. Crime and thrillers, romances, “racy” stories, “true” confessions…every genre was represented, although the thriller authors are the names who we can recall best and easiest: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Earl Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Lester Dent, Frank Gruber and more–along with their many pen names.
I’ve read more than my share of the old pulp tales. It’s actually where I started out in science fiction, because in the tiny Western Australian country where I grew up, there was no bookstore or library, and I had to raid the bookshelves of friends and family to get my fix. When we visited the city, I would scrape the shelves of secondhand bookstores and snatch up anything with a spaceship on it. I ended up with a lot of anthologies of older, classic SF tales, which is where I met Asimov and Heinlein for the first time.
This personal and publishing history was at the forefront of my mind when I sat down to write the first Ptolemy Lane tale, and build the world he lived in.
The Body In the Zero Gee Brothel is my homage to the old pulps and their amazing artwork.
Meet Ptolemy Jovan Lane, a unique peacemaker.Laws are hard to hold, out in the fringes of known space, but Ptolemy Lane is charged with maintaining peace under the dome of Georgina’s Town, among humans, the docile emre and more.
When a body is discovered in a zero gee suite in the local casino’s brothel wing, Lane is reluctant to get involved. The casino is off limits to his style of law keeping. Only, the body is the casino’s owner, Guisy Oakmint, and Doc Lowry is insisting Lane investigate. Lane soon learns why…
“The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel” is the first Ptolemy Lane story in the science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper.
The Ptolemy Lane Tales:
1.0: The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel
2.0: The Captain Who Broke the Rules
…and more to come!
Space Opera Science Fiction Novelette
The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel was released at all retailers this morning.
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October 7, 2021
Didn’t find any dragons beyond the map…
But I did get lost, to be sure. New experiences right!? Anyways, I have navigated beyond the map and resurfaced with a Patreon page, in response to a lot of requests for:
The Patreon tiers provide all those benefits and more.
If you already buy my books on a retail site and you’re perfectly happy with that arrangement, but you like my stories so much you just want to give a little tip, there is that option, too.
Check out the new Patreon page here. As I get more familiar with Patreon I will tweak and add to it. Also, if you’re already subscribed to other authors’ Patreon pages and they offer benefits you think are really cool and would like me to offer, then let me know.
Enjoy!
September 29, 2021
20% Off Four Day Sale is Now On
This month’s SRP 20% Off Everything Sale started this morning. If you’re new to the list, here’s a quick outline:
You can get 20% off absolutely everything for sale at Stories Rule Press.
That includes boxed sets, and books already discounted, and all pre-orders (there’s a lot!)The sale lasts for four days
The last two days of this month and the first two days of next month.It finishes at midnight on the 2nd, MDT.Apply the coupon code (below) to your basket as you check out.
The coupon won’t work anywhere but the Stories Rule Press site.And it expires after midnight on October 2nd.But you can use it as many times as you want between now and then.There is no upper or lower limit on what you can buy. All authors (including me) are part of the sale.Here’s the coupon code for this month: ZE2V7ZWF
To start browsing the books on SRP, click here. You can browse by a range of categories, including by author, by genre, by popularity, by price, etc.
Cheers,
Cam.
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Big opening excerpt from a new series!
Sort-of a new series. If you’re a serious SF fan & collector, it’s possible you already have a copy of today’s story, The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel, as it was previously published in Boundary Shock Quarterly.
Now I’m releasing it independently — details below.
But first, the opening excerpt:
Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM THE BODY IN THE ZERO GEE BROTHEL
COPYRIGHT © CAMERON COOPER 2021
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A stranger was sitting behind Ninety-Eight’s desk when I strolled into the station on the morning of my 25,000th day on Abbatangelo. He was a nervous fellow with fine brown hair, big eyes and long fingers. I should have taken his appearance as a portent, but I just flat didn’t care.
The nervous one gulped when he saw me. “Mr. Lane. Sir. I mean…do I call you Sherriff?”
“Not if you want me to answer.” I was tempted to brush by but said, instead, “Who are you?”
“I…um…Hyland. Emily didn’t tell you?”
All I wanted was to get to my desk and check messages, so I could call the day done and go home. A quart of Martian brandy, a gift from a client, was calling my name. Instead of that, I swore and studied Nervous. “She quit on me?”
“She didn’t tell you…” He picked at the controls on the smart desk. The film on the top was coming loose, which meant the desk wasn’t as smart as it should be.
“That was the deal,” I said. “She can quit whenever she wants, as long as she finds and trains a replacement. That’s the deal with you, as well. Got it?”
“You’ve said that more than once before, haven’t you?” Then he pressed his fingers to his lips as if he was more shocked than me by what he had said.
“Okay, listen, Ninety-Nine, we’ll get along much better if—” I didn’t get to finish, because his smart desk lit up.
He stared at it. I didn’t think it was possible for his eyes to get bigger, but they did.
“That’s your cue,” I told him.
He prodded experimentally.
I reached over and tapped the connect button. The holograph formed over the top. I knew the man’s face. His nose demanding remembering.
Ninety-Nine managed to stutter, “Ptolemy Lane’s office.”
The face frowned. “Lemme speak to Lane.”
Ninety-Nine could see me through the hologram, so I shook my head.
“Mr. Lane says he’s not here.”
I sighed. Reached through the head to spin the display to face me. “I’m here. Who are you?”
“Kumar. I’m the manager at the Desiderata—”
“No.”
He caught back his breath. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re a casino and brothel. That’s out of my service area.”
“You have a service area?” He sounded puzzled rather than offended. “I thought you covered all of Georgina’s Town?”
“Except the casino and brothel. I told Guisy Oakmint so when he said he was going into business. I’m just one man and your joint is a crime magnet. Oakmint knows to clean up his own messes.” And for eleven years, he had.
Kumar shook his head. “That’s just it. It’s Mr. Oakmint. He’s dead.”
I paused. Took in a breath or two. I knew Guisy enough to share a drink here and there, although the last serious conversation we’d had was when he told me about his new joint venture. “Sorry, kid,” I told the manager. “But it’s still not my concern. Call in Doc Lowry. He deals with bodies.”
“Doc Lowry said you would be interested,” Kumar said quickly, as I reached for the kill switch.
Damn it.
I pulled back my hand. “Doc said that? Why?”
Kumar glanced over his shoulder, then said, “Mr. Oakmint was murdered and we’re pretty sure an undocumented human did it.”
I rubbed the back of my neck to hide my reaction as something fizzed and flared in my gut. “I’ll be there in fifteen,” I told Kumar.
I had to calm Ninety-Nine down before I left. He was jumping out of his skin.
“I waited five years for a license to move here,” he wailed. “My first week and there’s a murder!”
“Crime happens, kid,” I told him. “That’s why I have a job.” I didn’t say anything else, but I did wonder what the hell he had been thinking, taking up work with the town’s only law enforcement authority.
“They said you keep the peace,” Ninety-Nine muttered.
“I do. This is me keeping it.” I put on my coat and took the five-minute walk along Main Street to the casino at the edge of the town limits.
Said that way, it makes Georgina’s Town sound small, but it only looks small on flat schematics. I was at street level where actual sunlight filtered through the dome far overhead, but there was another ten levels beneath my feet. And a building on the central section of Main Street that didn’t reach up at least twenty floors didn’t exist.
Things were crammed under the dome because nearly thirty thousand people squeezed in here, with twice more begging for permission to reside. Mayor Carpos didn’t charge taxes. He didn’t need to. Resident tickets brought in all the revenue the town needed, and their price rose every season.
I looked balefully up at the blue sun as I moved along Main Street. The sunlight flickered and glinted as personal pods zipped across the dome. Most of my work took place at night, when idiots thought they could get away with whatever they were up to. It wasn’t just the Martian brandy I was missing right then. I badly needed sleep. I’d been patrolling most of the night and I’d only stopped at the office to check messages because I was passing it. Now I wish I’d gone straight home, polarized the windows and passed out as I had wanted to.
The Desiderata was the shortest building on Main Street, only because the dome itself limited vertical expansion. On Earth, the outskirts of town were the undesirable areas. Here in Georgina’s Town, the outskirts were the expensive lots, because they had unique views of the land beyond the dome. I suppose it was a view worth paying for, if you liked frozen tundra. I liked the view from my mid-dome windows just fine.
I moved up the steps and through the door into the main casino. It was like stepping into a different world, one that always brought me to a halt when I did walk through those doors. There was no hint, outside, of the exotic environment in here. Oakmint had arranged it deliberately, I think, to avoid ruffling the hides of Georgina’s Town residents.
We liked our peace. Everyone with a legitimate license to live here had paid well for the privilege and waited patiently to be given the okay to even apply for residency. Then came screenings and interviews and the final exchange of money.
As Georgina’s Town was a domed city and the lock to enter it was tightly controlled, you only got in here if you had a temporary visa or a residence’s license. And the residences didn’t want neon razzle and flash from casinos and their standard customers ruining the peace of their town.
Kumar had told me to meet him at the main bar, so I re-hinged my jaw and moved across the plush flooring, heading for the wider corridor between all the tables. It was frantically busy here despite the morning hour, and everyone wore evening attire—or was still wearing it from last night. Lots of glitter and flesh on display, which I ignored.
The aliens were harder to ignore. The emre were easy to pick out because they stood thirty centimeters taller than humans on average, and they had no visible body hair. They were bi-pedal, with heads on top of upright figures, but their skin was more hide-like in consistency, with blue highlights over the bald dome and eyes, and orange-red everywhere else. Their lips were blue, but the skin around the thick, very wide mouth faded from orange to a pale yellow.
A ridge ran from under their eye, around the back of their head, to stop under their other eye. There was no equivalent to a nose. Scientists had guessed that they breathed through their mouths, but no one had ever confirmed that.
No one knew what an emra wore on their home planet, because in their usual obsequious way, emre instantly adopted the habits and customs of those around them, to avoid offense. They wore human clothes, which fit, more or less. They were not a gendered species and I hadn’t figured out how they decided to wear men’s or women’s clothes. Maybe they switched up, depending on the season. I didn’t know any emre well enough to ask.
I likely never would, either. I didn’t much like them. Their fawning lack of spine irritated me. Still, they had managed to infiltrate the fringes deep enough to reach Abbatangelo, and they behaved themselves while they were here.
Some in the fringes argued we owed the emre. The emre had warned humans about the Vind. I was still trying to decide if the emre had done us any favors on that one. We’d managed to stay out of the emre-Vind war, which had raged for a thousand years, but I wasn’t sure the cost was worth it.
It was too early in the morning to think about a far distant war, even though I knew exactly why my thoughts had roamed there, and it wasn’t just the sight of the emre at the tables, jumping about and clicking loudly in their native tongue when they got too excited to use Standard. I stepped around and between gamblers, feeling dusty and down-dressed in my black coat, which served me well out on the streets.
I moved over to the bar. An extra-long emra was passed out, their head in a puddle of green liquid. I hoped it was booze and nothing else. I moved up a seat or two away from them and said to the barman’s back. “Looking for Kum—never mind,” I finished as the barman turned toward me. “You said you were the manager,” I added as the man I’d spoken to seventeen minutes ago came over to where I was standing.
“I am,” Kumar said. “I also tend bar when its needed. I’ve got a hysterical barman breathing oxygen out the back. Everyone liked Mr. Oakmint.”
I looked around the casino floor, at the intense expressions of concentration, the glum losers, the few winners. “Clearly.”
“The staff liked him,” Kumar amended.
“Yeah-huh. Where’s the body?”
Kumar blinked. “Well…”
“You haven’t moved it?” I said sharply.
“Doc Lowry said not to, only…”
I frowned, anticipating some objection to the body interfering with business. This was another reason I had refused to service Oakmint’s place. The heavy emphasis on business above all else didn’t sit well with me, even though I had no objections to money, per se. But dealing with the casino folk—both the paying suckers and the threadbare staff—always left me longing for a hint of human empathy.
“It’s moving by itself, see,” Kumar said.
I stared at him, puzzlement warring with impatience.
“You’d better come with me,” Kumar added.
Meet Ptolemy Jovan Lane, a unique peacemaker.Laws are hard to hold, out in the fringes of known space, but Ptolemy Lane is charged with maintaining peace under the dome of Georgina’s Town, among humans, the docile emre and more.
When a body is discovered in a zero gee suite in the local casino’s brothel wing, Lane is reluctant to get involved. The casino is off limits to his style of law keeping. Only, the body is the casino’s owner, Guisy Oakmint, and Doc Lowry is insisting Lane investigate. Lane soon learns why…
“The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel” is the first Ptolemy Lane story in the science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper.
The Ptolemy Lane Tales:
1.0: The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel
2.0: The Captain Who Broke the Rules
…and more to come!
Space Opera Science Fiction Novelette
The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel is book 1 of the new Ptolemy Lane Tales series, which (as you can probably tell from the excerpt) has a fun old-style-pulp tinge.
It is now available at all retailers, and as usual, if you pre-order directly from me at Stories Rule Press, you get your copy of the story a week earlier than everyone else. That is, next week.
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September 10, 2021
More Space Opera to fix your appetite
If you’re already through the last book in the Iron Hammer series (I know some of you are very fast readers), then here’s a new one to check out from Sean Willson.
Isolation is the first book in his Dark Nebula series. Check out the description and links here.
September 9, 2021
Holy Sheep Dip! I did it!
Late in 2020, I was sitting around with the other authors at Stories Rule Press, coming up with production schedule ideas. Basically: “What shall we write next year?”
I don’t remember who’s idea it was, but someone suggested, half-joking, that I should write my new space opera series, which had eight books, in eight months. Just to show I could do it. Unless I thought I couldn’t…?
Now, a book a month is do-able for me. I write full time, and I can clear off the decks and get a lot of words written, when I have to.
But I would have to keep up that pace for eight whole months.
Yet there was that dangling, implied challenge: Could I do it?
What made me decide to go ahead and try it was thinking about all the SF series I’m in the middle of reading, from other authors, and the sensation I get at the end of the latest book, when I know the next book in the series is months, if not years away.
I thought about how cool it would be for readers to pick up the very next book next month. Then they wouldn’t have to reach too hard to remember who all the characters were, and what had happened to that point in the series.
And yeah, there was a bit of bravado mixed in, too. “So, you think I can’t do it, huh?”
So I accepted the challenge. Then they made the stakes serious: I had to put all the books on pre-order, right now. As there are serious consequences for missing a pre-order date (authors get banned from doing pre-orders for a year, if they do), putting all eight books up for pre-order made this a do-or-die challenge.
I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. And at first, it was fine. I was getting the books out. Only, with each book, I got a little more behind. COVID vaccinations wiped me out for a week. Twice. Family events, Christmas, and other unexpected stuff came up that kept chipping away a day here, a couple of days there….
By the time I got to book 8, Redline Rebels, I was seriously worried about my immovable deadline, which loomed closer and closer.
I made it by the skin of my teeth, and because the other SRP authors all rallied around and line edited and produced the book in a matter of days, instead of the weeks we usually take to produce new books.
The last few weeks have been a marathon sprint. That is, a sprint that never ended. But I finally got there. Phew!!
Redline Rebels was released early this morning, on all stores, everywhere, including the SRP store.
Danny and the Carinad worlds fight for survival.The underdog Carinad forces face an enemy who knows nothing but war, whose culture is built upon the glory of battle. As the Slavers fall upon the vulnerable Carinad worlds, Danny and her allies work to find a way out of the no-win scenario they face…
Redline Rebels is the eighth and final book in the Iron Hammer space opera science fiction series by award-winning SF author Cameron Cooper. The Iron Hammer series is a spin off from the acclaimed Imperial Hammer series, and features many of the characters and situations from that series.
The Iron Hammer series:
1.0: Galactic Thunder
2.0: Stellar Storm
3.0: Planetary Parlay
4.0: Waxing War
5.0: Ruled Out
6.0: Stranger Stars
7.0: Federal Force
8.0: Redline Rebels
Space Opera Science Fiction Novel
Redline Rebels is available for pre-order everywhere. And don’t forget that if you preorder direct from me (on the Stories Rule Press site), then you get your copy of the book a week earlier. That is, next Thursday.
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August 30, 2021
August/September 20% Off Sale is now on
SRP’s end-of-the-month-start-of-the-month sale starts today. 20% off all purchases on SRP, for four days only.
Today’s 20% off coupon code is:
ZZ89MV67
The coupon is only for sales on the Stories Rule Press store, but it includes everything on the site, including boxed sets and items already on sale.
The sale runs from today through to the end of September 2nd, MDT. You can use the coupon code as often as you want, and you can pass the code on to friends.
Start browsing for books here: https://storiesrulepress.com/shop/
Use the code on the checkout page, to apply the 20% discount.
Cheers,
Cam.
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