The Dangerous Type is 9
Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the first of my space opera novels, The Dangerous Type. I can’t believe it’s been out such a long time!
Writing a space opera trilogy was the dream of my lifetime. It was an honor to work with Jeremy Lassen, who let me get away with pretty much every crazy idea I came up with.
In honor of the book’s birthday, I thought I’d give you a little taste of the first chapter. Of course it begins in a cemetery:
According to plan, they’d wriggle into the tomb one at a time. Kavanaugh always went first. He was the crew boss, hence the most expendable if they tripped a booby-trap. It was a point of honor for him that he didn’t ask the men to do anything he wouldn’t volunteer for himself. It made him better than Sloane. Besides, Curcovic always joked, Kavanaugh would need the others to figure out how to free him if the slab slipped.
Kavanaugh always had a moment, as he slithered past the edge of a slab, when he feared it would rock back into place and crush him. Or worse, it would rock back after he’d passed it, trapping him inside the tomb. No telling how long it would take someone to die inside one of those graves, how long until the air ran out or dehydration made breathing cease to matter. It wasn’t as if Sloane would feel he had enough invested in the team to rescue anyone. Kavanaugh wouldn’t put it past the boss to decide it was more cost effective to simply hire new men, leaving the originals behind as a warning to be more careful.
Most of the tombs they’d entered had warehoused whole companies of bugs, the dead warriors of a single campaign buried together. Kavanaugh played his light around the inside this cavern but found only a single catafalque, an uncarved slab of obsidian in the rough center of the room. Whoever lay atop it must be important, he thought. Shouldn’t take too long to loot one body. Maybe there would actually be something worth stealing this time.
Kavanaugh peeled off his face shield and lifted the flask, sucking down the last half of its contents as the men converged on the catafalque. His boot knocked something over. When he bent down to retrieve it, he found a human-made electric torch. Damn. Had someone beaten them to this one?
“What’s a human girl doing in here?” Taki asked.
“There’s your dancing girl,” Curcovic teased. “Maybe you can wake her with a kiss.”
“ ’Cept for the dust,” Lim commented.
“Well, yeah, ’cept for the dust, Lim. Damn, man, don’t you have any imagination?”
“Just what did you have in mind?” Lim asked skeptically.
“Are you sure she’s human?” Kavanaugh asked as he slipped the flask back inside his coat.
“I think she’s just a kid,” Curcovic added. “No armor. You think she was somebody important’s kid?”
“She’s the best thing I’ve seen on this rock so far,” Taki pointed out. His hand wiped some of the dust from her chest.
Kavanaugh was crossing the uneven floor to join them when a low female voice said clearly, “No.”
Curcovic stumbled backward, dropping his torch and fumbling at the gun at his hip. The corpse sat up, straight-arming her fist into Taki’s face. Stunned, he cracked his head on the stone floor when he went down. He lay still at the foot of the catafalque.
Lim backed away, light trained on the figure rising in the middle of the tomb. It was hard for Kavanaugh to make her out in the unsteady light: a slip of a girl dressed in gray with a cloak of dusty black hair that fell past her knees.
Curcovic finally succeeded in drawing his gun. The girl darted sideways faster than Kavanaugh could follow in the half-light. A red bolt flashed out, blinding in the darkness. Lim collapsed to the floor, cursing Curcovic.
The girl rounded on Curcovic, turning a one-handed cartwheel that left her in range to kick the gun from his hand. She twisted around, nearly too quick to see, and cracked her fist hard into his chest. Curcovic fell as if poleaxed. Lim groaned from the floor, hands clasped over his belly.
None of the men were dead yet, Kavanaugh noticed. She could have killed them as if they’d been standing still, but she’d disabled them instead. He suspected that was because they posed no real threat to her. Maybe she needed them alive. He hoped that was true.
Cold sweat ran into Kavanaugh’s eyes. He held the flask in his gun hand. He’d have to drop it to draw his weapon. If the noise caught her attention, he’d be headed for the ground before his gun barrel cleared his holster.
“We didn’t mean you any harm,” he said gently as he let go of the flask.
***
Enslaved, trained as a killer, entombed, and abandoned: you can see why Raena Zacari might have a chip on her shoulder. In the grimdark universe of this propulsive action-heavy debut, the universe’s deadliest assassin sets off on a mission of vengeance into a galaxy destabilized by genocidal warfare. Her target — the despotic warlord Thallian — is on the run for war crimes but determined to reclaim what he believes is his by right. Along with a supporting cast of smugglers, black market doctors, and ne’er-do-wells sprawled across a galaxy brimming with alien life, The Dangerous Type is a fantastic beginning to Loren Rhoads’s epic trilogy.
The Dangerous Type is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or at Biblio. You can also get a copy directly from my bookstore.
It’s also available as an audiobook. Here’s the link. Check out the first chapter for free.
