Yeesh, it’s been a while. So much has happened over here, and we’ve managed to clone the magical girl not once but twice now.

I seriously need to get another novel out. Part of my problem is that I’ve had trouble buckling down on a single project I’ve been drifting back and forth between sequels to my existing work and other things, but I finally grit my teeth and decided to finish The Cup of Agamemnon, a planetary romance I’ve had in the back of my mind for some time.

Below is a teaser from the first chapter. This is rough, of course, and it may be too heavy on info-dumping, so it will likely be trimmed before it sees print:

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“Is he dead?” Angelica asked.

“He’s breathing,” I replied.

“Then he’s not dead.”

“Not yet,” said Sam after spitting out a stream of blackish liquid produced by the stuff he’d been chewing, “but he will be if you two stand around jawing.”

“That’s true,” I answered, “but you’re not supposed to move an injured man.”

“Sure. But you ain’t supposed to leave him in the mountains to freeze to death, either.”

“Very well. Sam, grab his legs. I’ll grab—”

“Ain’t no sense in it, him being light. I’ll just carry him myself.”

And Sam, the hulking brute, did exactly that: He bent down, took up the unconscious Gernian, and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of tubers. I winced, but I held my peace. Right now, I wanted to keep my head attached to my shoulders—and considering my situation, that meant holding my peace.

To make a long story short, our interstellar craft had unexpectedly struck atmosphere during a phase-out of its Alcubierre drive’s warp field. An Alcubierre drive is tricky to operate, especially in-system: By compressing spacetime in one direction and expanding it in the other, it can move a ship across the galaxy in a minute without relativistic effects. But traveling such a distance in one go would build up enough energy to produce a nova-sized explosion when the drive deactivated, so it’s necessary to travel in short hops, stretching a minute-long trip into months. Inside a star system, the hops have to be even shorter.

We made a bad hop and collided with our target. The protective ceramics burned off, and the ship hit the dirt hard, so it was now a smoking pile of slag. We were stranded without food and with little water in a barren range of mountains where the air was thin and cold but breathable. There was no snow, either because the wind had blown it away or because the air was too dry.

We were four in number: Three of us were mammals, so our needs were similar, but the fourth was something indeterminate, transcending all mortal classifications. Fortunately, he had his own ways of sustaining himself—ways too disgusting to describe.

The peaks over our heads were rough and came to sharp, needle-like points. The rocks, mostly flint, cut into our feet. But I knew this world was inhabited, or at least had been, and I was confident that we were not the first to walk through this forbidding mountain pass: There were telltale signs of beasts—too many to be random—mostly in the form of droppings but sometimes of churned gravel or overturned stones. At regular intervals, we found trash pits containing steel wire, fragments of what were probably harnesses, and rusted steel cans soldered with lead. All the evidence pointed to pack trains. This was a trade route, and I said so to my companions.

Our de facto leader was Angelica. She told me to shut up, so I did. She had been the ship’s captain, and she was still in charge. Besides, her formidable technology put the rest of us at her mercy. She was our best hope for making it out of the mountains and finding water, and she could also kill us in a nanosecond if she had a mind to.

By the way, she blamed the crash on me.

Continue reading “The Cup of Agamemnon”