Until he's handed an on-planet assignment in Ireland, of all
places, as an undercover international student of aquaponics. His real plan? To
pull scientists and their families out of a country careening toward civil
war--and off earth to a world of their own before marital-law lockdown ends
their ground-breaking discoveries.
Risking his life is no novelty for Ranyk. He's been battered
by asteroids, nearly incinerated in volcanoes, and has out-piloted pirates. But
political espionage on Earth is more dangerous that anything he's encountered
before, and he's completely ill-equipped for such delicate matters. Now he must
figure out who to trust and who to eliminate, or it will mean his freedom, the
safety of forty thousand desperate colonists, and the lives of his friends.
Hi everyone, I’m Derick William
Dalton. I'm one of those people who had “what I want to be when I grow up” all
planned out. Problem is, I haven't grown up yet. In the meantime, I've been a
high school science teacher and spend my current days as a physician assistant.
Ms. Swinton invited me to post
an excerpt of my novel Houses of Common, now available on Amazon and
CreateSpace. A sci-fi thriller with a literary twist, I hope you enjoy a
glimpse into one of the characters. Sckiik is a female alien, former Virginia
State Patrol officer, and current head of security for her species’ embassy to
the United States. With intelligence indicating an assassination attempt on the
Ambassador, Sckiik blasts into space, tailing the Ambassador's ship for
protection.
***
One more hit like that and I'm
dust.
Sckiik’s sensors indicated she
only had a few moments as the assassin’s third missile approached. She tried
venting compressed cockpit oxygen to alter her course, but the valve wouldn't
respond. She hit the emergency fire suppression system in the instrument panel,
hoping the argon foam might leak out the damaged nosecone and push her out of
the way. Instead, the panel shorted out right in her face with a flash of
sparks and smoke. With two seconds to spare, Sckiik tried her last plan.
“Survive this.”
Sckiik set off one more reactor
burn to increase speed. Then she punched out, the ejection charge blowing her
clear of the drone-turned-missile. The assassins' missile was on course, but
the energy plating held again despite the detonation.
Sckiik had a spectacular view of
the collision between her drone and the assassin ship. The ejection had started
the drone in an end-over-end tumble, as she had hoped. It was perpendicular to
the ship when they met, and Sckiik watched as it neatly bisected the entire
assassin vessel, atmosphere pouring and crystallizing out the halves now
spinning in opposite directions. The drone was reduced to metal droplets,
vaporized on impact and creating a cone of sparkles along what would have been
its path.
“That's my art. Wish I had a brush
to sign it.”
Sckiik looked as long as she could
before the destructive beauty of high-speed collision shrank into the distance.
Her victory would have to be fully celebrated later. Her next concern was traveling
through space at nearly a hundred kilometers per second, with only a thin
vacsuit and her exoskeleton protecting her. Checking the equipment at her belt,
she grabbed for her vectoring gun, but realized its uselessness. Its emission
of compressed air could alter her direction or double as an emergency
respiration supply, but it would not be enough to stop her. A few silent blue
explosions erupted from the assassin vessel, but it all vanished into the
distance before she could relocate the Ambassador's ship. Glancing over her
shoulder, she was grateful for the initial heading she'd taken, as she would be
more likely to orbit the moon at least once than to collide with it or shoot
past.
Has anyone ever made a lunar
orbit in a vacsuit? I'm making history. Except officially I was never here.
The novelty of her accomplishment
wore off as the seriousness of her predicament sunk in. If the Ambassador's
ship didn't come for her, her only hope was to be detected in lunar orbit. That
wasn't likely. She was in a higher orbit than the satellites, and their sensors
would be pointed at the surface. The few facing out to track incoming ships
were probably not calibrated for an object as small and cold and nonmetallic as
a female Rildj flailing through the void.
Flinging out a leg, she started a
slow rotation to prevent one side of her vacsuit from taking too much radiation
from the sun. The stars circled in front of her, the moon just peeking into the
periphery of her sight as it looped about, and she felt like the center of the
universe.
Seeing the stars from a ship is
one thing, but this is a perspective like no other. Maybe not worth the risk of
death, but what a way to go out.
From within sprouted infrequent
but familiar memories. Sckiik as a child, gazing from the Kyrnact,
trying in her small mind to perceive the universe. The experience often
unfolded as an internal battle. But the rising hopelessness and terror at
facing the vast void would lose out to the beauty of it, a calm reassurance
from some unseen source washing away fear. She remembered wondering if the
sensation was the god or gods humans spoke of, something or someone unseen but
felt in moments of quiet reflection. Or was the calm a neurochemical effect, a
protection from depression or insanity when having one's insignificance
contrasted with the infinity of the universe?
Sckiik found truth in them both.
It wasn't unusual among Rildj to hold some belief in the supernatural, but even
the particularly religious she knew wouldn't be considered so by human standards.
“If we have an official religion,” she had once been told, “one worships by
living and living well.” But the explanation felt hollow and forced when
feeling very small yet very watched in the expanse of the galaxy. Living,
living well, and being looked after.
There was another place, too, in
which she had that sense. Sckiik was still working out why certain worship
rituals felt the same as the Kyrnact viewport of her childhood, and she
pondered it weekly.
Surrounded by women in dresses and
men in neckties, her calmness was dulled slightly by self-consciousness. Her
vacsuit looked very out of place, but Sckiik could only imagine how much more
awkward she would appear in similar dress, even if by some miracle none of it
caught on her spines. She wondered at first how uncomfortable others might feel
due to her presence; a science-fiction monster, perhaps shorter and with fewer
appendages than in movies, but still sitting right next to them singing about
Jesus.
Each time she had changed jobs and
moved, Sckiik was surprised more people didn't hide their children, and only a
few times did someone move to a different pew. She had sensed a pattern after
seeing a few congregations in action and could usually pick out the players on
day one. There was always the careful avoidance of eye contact from a person or
two, indignant she would dare by her very existence to contradict their
personal interpretation of the first few pages of Genesis. Sometimes she'd hear
comments about her species' cultural lack of theism, an ironically arrogant
statement of human spiritual superiority. Someone, usually a young man who had
interest in the ministry, would take it upon himself to instruct her at length,
quoting verses to excess, about the basics of Christianity. She would parry the
patronization into awkward silence with a flirtatious comment. Stares from the
adolescent kids were followed by whispered conversations with their parents,
asking permission to hear about alien physiology parlor tricks and starship
piloting adventures. She could usually get away from that mob if she sat in the
back close to the door.
Mostly, though, the pattern was
pleasant. Without fail, some family would ask Sckiik to dinner, then
hesitatingly, sometimes fearfully, ask about her diet. More people made her
feel welcome than not. There was discomfort from those experiencing something
new, she had sensed that plainly. But underlying it was a friendliness
enough to make her feel welcomed.
Last week had been her first time
attending church in D.C. Sckiik had arrived as it was starting, and she pulled
off the faceplate of her vacsuit as she entered. She felt distanced enough from
everyone without two centimeters of polycarbonate between them. Wearing it in
front of others also felt like hiding, as if she were covering something up,
preventing someone from reading her. Not that humans could. It also made
her feel penitent, trusting; exposing herself to discomfort for the sake of
worship. That first day she had sat in the back, sharing a hymnal with a boy of
about nine. Until Sckiik sat next to him, he had looked penitent and
trusting. Now his expression was somewhere between horror and awe, sitting next
to someone from another planet.
Afterward, the minister had
approached her as the congregation milled around the pews conversing. The
nine-year-old still sat with a stunned look on his face, oblivious to anything
but Sckiik. She noted the volume of nearby conversations decrease, and some
sideways glances from those too shy or disturbed by her presence to initiate a
conversation but too curious to go about their business. Sckiik took no
offense. Here were people who made efforts with varying success to be there for
others, the better part of human nature. If part of that nature included a
fascination with the unusual, Sckiik wasn't one to complain. That same
fascination had prompted her to remain on Earth to become a police officer
fourteen years ago.
“Good morning, I'm Reverend
Garrett.” He stuck his hand out in greeting, then hesitated, a hint of worry
between his eyebrows. Sckiik had seen it before, the sudden question of her
anatomical or cultural ability to shake hands and the sudden realization at
such close proximity this was, indeed, an alien from another planet. That
centuries of scientific and religious debate about life on other planets were
over, the proof staring him in the face. She quickly put him at ease with a
quick grip of her gloved, three-fingered hand.
“Sckiik,” she replied. “Nice to
meet you. Do you have a moment?”
“I do. Let's talk in my office.”
Sckiik had followed Reverend
Garrett through the foyer as eyes followed her.
What had it taken last time, two
months? Not a very long time to become accustomed to an interstellar Gentile.
“You'll forgive me if I'm
awkward,” Reverend Garrett began, sitting not behind his desk but beside it.
“I've never met anyone from Rildj before, much less been their minister. Let me
know if I commit a faux pas.” He smiled, the wrinkles around his eyes
becoming more visible next to the salt-and-pepper hair of his temples.
“You'd be surprised how hard that
is to do. Consider the vacsuit my Sunday best, and I'll try not to poke holes
in the seats,” she said, moving her elbow to accentuate the spine there. She
noted his effort in maintaining eye contact, his focus wandering to her alien
form. Her acknowledgment of differences gave him permission to do the same.
“It seems you have it figured
out,” he replied, nodding toward her legs, lower knees tucked under the seat
and to the back, the three-toed boots barely protruding from underneath. “What
did you want to discuss?” he asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.
Sckiik could tell he was uncomfortable despite his outward friendliness. She
wondered if the cause was her physical presence or what she imagined was the
worst part of being in the clergy: worrying what kind of confession was about
to come out.
“I'm sure Reverend Holman told you
I was coming and probably mentioned our conversations.”
“He did.”
“So you know I've always worked
law enforcement and security jobs. They sometimes get violent.”
“You inflicting violence on
others, you mean.”
“Yes. To keep it away from the
innocent.”
Reverend Garrett was calm,
obviously not surprised. “So tell me what makes you uncomfortable about it.”
“Nothing.”
“You're not uncomfortable with the
violence?”
“No. Not at all.”
Now he was not so calm. “Is this
why we're talking?”
“I've killed twenty-six people.
It's a huge thou-shalt-not, but most people aren't too concerned about military
and police service exceptions. Including me. My worry is a lack of remorse. I
don't feel it like human cops.”
Garret was silent for a heartbeat.
“This is new for me. Is that a typical number?”
She shook her head. “I am good at
what I do. I volunteer for assignments where I'm most likely to draw my weapon.
I wonder if it's a natural inclination to my strengths. To protect others from
dangerous situations. Or if I'm developing an enjoyment.”
Reverend Garrett sat for a moment.
“So this is about motivation more than action.”
Sckiik wondered to herself, as she
had when meeting other ministers, why she was so open with a stranger, why it
was more comforting for her to talk than not. On the first day of meeting this
man she was enlisting him in her most personal of struggles. “Yes. Being versus
doing.”
“The line between those,” he said
with a sigh, “is a centuries-old debate and no small area of contention among
scholars and priests. But to be honest, their decisions don't usually translate
well into personal life.”
“What does translate well?”
“I've always felt intentions are
as important as actions relative to living as we ought.” He leaned forward in
his seat. “You wouldn't be talking to me—you wouldn't
have talked to others—if the well-being of those
around you didn't matter, or if you didn't have at least some belief in the
first place.”
“Belief in what? Goodness in
general, mine in particular? Or are you speaking more broadly, about belief in
the existence of God?”
“It's my understanding there is
very little organized religion on your home world.”
“That's true,” Sckiik said, unsure
where he was leading.
“Then what happened to you?
You feel and act differently. Something made you wonder about your behavior and
the motivations behind them. I suspect there is a connection between that event
and the answer to your current question.”
***
Houses of Common is available on the Kindle here.
Amazon also has the paperback
version, but use this $4 coupon code (APSQBFT8), and it’s cheaper from CreateSpace.
Thanks, Ms. Swinton. Random on!
Here are my two cents on this trilogy.
