Chapter One

“Repent! Repent!” the naked man screamed. “You desecrate the perfection gifted to us by the Ancients! You sacrifice your humanity to the false god of technology!”
Ashton Carpenter watched the street preacher out of the corner of his eye, afraid to look straight at him for fear the man might try to engage him. The guy had balls to start haranguing crowds outside a Skin-ganger chop shop. The cyborgs, “Evolutionists” they liked to call themselves, were already filtering out of the dingy, sheet metal building, their glowing red oculars glaring at the Predecessor Cult missionaries. The neon glow of the street signs glinted menacingly off the exposed silvery metal of their bionic limbs and Ash walked a little faster.
Kanesh was bad enough without wading through a religious gang war. He hated the dank, claustrophobic chill of the tunnels and the thin sheen of condensation clinging to every metal or plastic surface and the unshakable feeling that with every step he was descending deeper into the bowels of Hell. Docking at the asteroid’s hub, the place had seemed a strange and almost quaintly bureaucratic cut-rate version of upscale pleasure stations like Belial in the Alpha Centauri system, except here they let you keep your weapons as long as you paid an exorbitant tax.
But then he’d traveled spinward in the lift, out towards the levels of the rotating cylinder of asteroid rock with higher centripetal gravity, and had to search each one of them, had to experience everything that people were willing to do to each other when there were no consequences for their actions. Kanesh had been built by the Pirate World cartels, far outside the jurisdiction of the Patrol, too remote for even the military to bother with it. Like Belial and other, smaller pleasure stations inside the bounds of the Commonwealth, it was a “blown” asteroid, cored with a high-power laser, filled with water, spun and then heated with solar reflectors until it expanded like a balloon, leaving a thick skin of nickel iron shielding the empty space within.
Unlike Belial, Kanesh lacked even the semblance of law or restraint. The station had been built by criminals as neutral ground, a place to do business without the worry of another cartel crashing through the door or one side double-crossing the other. And that was the only order maintained on Kanesh: business was sacrosanct and anyone who interfered with it was dealt with swiftly and brutally, usually without even wasting a round of ammo on them. The bodies floated like debris in orbit around the station, more effective than any verbal warning.
Cartel negotiators, smuggler crews, assassins, bounty hunters, enforcers, fugitives and exiles flocked here, and so did those who fed on their appetites. There were restaurants and bars and hotels and dance clubs, of course, almost prosaic in how little they differed from businesses just like them on dozens of worlds. They seemed out of place here, obscene in their normality next to the other things, the things you wouldn’t find even on the Pirate Worlds themselves, because none of the cartel leaders would want to admit they sanctioned such things.
Here, no attempt was made to hide their vices, no cosmetic veneer was thrown up as camouflage. Garish holographs advertised the attractions of each level, with little organization by types: gladiatorial combat to the death, with and without weapons, bettors welcome; chopshops where you could sell the limbs and organs stolen off of others, or have a suitable replacement grafted from the inventory, or have your own biological pieces replaced with cybernetics to chase the next step in human evolution; snuff show where you could watch unwilling participants killed live in imaginative ways; drug dens that catered to whatever addiction might suit, from conventional chemicals such as Kick and Spindle to black market ViR that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain.
And, of course, there were the older vices, the ones that were the great equalizer. No matter how powerful or dangerous or inhuman the client, everyone had the hardwired desire to get their rocks off. On Kanesh, you could do it safely, cheaply, simply, with cybernetic pleasure dolls and Virtual Reality, the same as on any of the seedier establishments in the Commonwealth proper. Pleasure dolls felt no pain, had no pride, carried no diseases or psychological baggage; you could do to them whatever you wished, indulge whatever sick fantasy that appealed to you without worrying about hurting anyone else.
Which was why those other places existed. Because humans being what they were, there were always a percentage who wanted to hurt others, who wanted pain and psychological scars, who wanted to make victims. The advertisements and the signs were open and blatantly honest in what they offered, and the open brutality of it struck Ash like a physical blow.

A new anthology called The Guardian collected by Alasdair Shaw, comes out tomorrow, and included in it is my short story “Gate of Dreams.”

http://www.alasdairshaw.co.uk/thenewcomer/guardian.php

Tales of the Acheron: Prodigal

 

Tales of the Acheron Book 1: Prodigal is now available on Amazon for Kindle!

I just finished the first novel in a new series featuring the main characters from Last Flight of the Acheron. Tales of the Acheron is going to be following Sandi and Ash as they live the outlaw life in the Pirate Worlds in the years after the war. I should have it edited and available for purchase within a week or two.

I have a short story in a new anthology by Alasdair Shaw called “The Guardian,” which is coming out Nov 26th and is now available for pre-order.

The Guardian

My short story is called “Gate of Dreams.” Hope you enjoy it!

I am currently attending an indie writers’ conference in Las Vegas, and it is making me thinking about the real utility of these sorts of things. As I sit through the lectures and classes, I keep thinking “I’ve heard this before,” whether in podcasts or articles. But the real utility of the thing seems to be the people you meet. And not just in the sense of networking allowing you new opportunities, just in reinforcing the idea that “Hey, there are a lot of others out there going through the same trials and tribulations as I am,” which is a more important thing than you might think.
I don’t know how many people read this blog, and of those I don’t know how many care about the experience of being a writer in general or an indie writer in particular, but if you’re at all interested, it can be a rather lonely path. You plot alone, inside your head. You write alone. You sit there in the dark, by yourself, and you hit that “publish” button and hope for the best. If you hear from a reader, it’s like a bright light in the tunnel, some indication not just that people are reading, but that someone cares about what you’re doing.
In that sort of isolation, when most of us don’t know any other writers in our town and don’t have anyone in our day-to-day life to commiserate with on the subject, it can be a priceless thing to meet up face-to-face with people who go through the same thing.
So was it worth the crappy Frontier flight and getting in to Vegas with my body feeling like it was 4AM and getting 3 hours sleep, and getting stuck in a smoking room the first night, and skipping lunch and not working out or running for four days and being away from my family?
Yeah, I think maybe it was.
It’s nice not being alone in this job.

Birthright is now available as an audio book on Amazon and audible.com!

Production has just completed on the audiobook version of Birthright and it should be available on Audible.com and Amazon very soon!
With Birthright, I will have five books available as audio books, with two more to come soon.
Duty, Honor, Planet, Glory Boy, Birthright, Recon: A War to the Knife and Recon: A Wolf in the Fold are either already out or will be within a few days, and the other two Recon novels, A Battle for the Gods and A Fight to the Death, will be out on audio soon!

Sandi worked the balky interface of the old shuttle expertly, hanging on for dear life and daring it to buck her off. The air was thick and hot and it buffeted the lander spitefully, as if some vengeful god knew why they were coming, but she only felt the vibration distantly, like it was happening to someone else.
Hold together, girl. She gave the controls a wispy caress with the slightest touch of her thoughts and the character of the turbulence changed in a way that no one else in the bird would have noticed, with the grain instead of against it. Just a little further…
“Jeez, Hollande, I thought you said you could fly this thing.”
The words, and the annoying, nasal whine that accompanied them, brought her out of the interface for a moment. She glanced beside her, careful to move just her eyes—she didn’t like the way the interface cables tugged at the sockets in her temples when she turned her head.
The round-faced, pudgy older man stuffed into the copilot’s seat glared at her with dour disapproval. His brown jacket was worn glossy in spots along the sleeves, where his tactical vest had polished it over years of use. The butt of the old but serviceable handgun sticking up from the shoulder holster on that vest reminded her who she was dealing with, and she stopped herself from snapping out the first response that had come to her lips.
“Captain, if you have anyone else with the jacks and the experience to land this brick with wings in this soup,” Sandrine Hollande said quietly, almost a murmur, “then they’re certainly welcome to try.”
Deruda grumbled under his breath, but didn’t respond. She wrestled down the grin that tried to fight its way onto her face. He was an asshole, but he was also her boss, and she needed this job.
She submerged again into the interface, absorbing the combination of the feeds from the exterior cameras, the lidar and radar and the instruments in a way that defied description to anyone who lacked the sockets. It wasn’t like having extra senses in that she didn’t actively perceive each bit of input; she just knew, the same way she knew where her own body was and where her next step would land. The shuttle, obsolete pile of junk though it might be, was her body, and guiding it down to the roughly-graded gravel landing field in the utter darkness of the storm-shrouded night was no different than surfing a Pacific wave on the California coast.
The jolt of the landing gear settling into their housings brought her back out of the interface and she began unstrapping her harness with rote motions while she powered back the acceleration couch. Deruda was still trying to pry his bulk out of his seat when she ducked out of the cockpit and through the short passage into the cargo hold. The “Captain” was as much of a fat piece of shit as the cargo bird and it seemed ludicrous to grant him the title, but it was due him as the master of a starship. The fact that the starship was a ragged, patched-together freighter a half a century old didn’t change that.
“Trucks are already out there, Ms. Hollande,” Frankie said, mashing the button to open the cargo doors.
“You can just call me Sandi,” she reminded him again, but the comment was lost in the grinding rattle of the ancient motors as the plastrons in the shuttle’s belly swung slowly open.
She shook her head. Frankie was an old-timer, his face lined and craggy and weathered from a life lived far enough away from the Commonwealth core systems that anti-aging treatments were unheard of. His manners were as old as his appearance, and she wondered how the hell he’d wound up working for La Sombra.
Then again, she thought ruefully, how the hell did I wind up working for them?
There was a flare of headlights that lit up the rainy darkness outside the cargo doors and the honk of a horn that signaled the crews outside were ready for the load. Frankie yanked downward on the lever set into the bulky metal gantry surrounding the cargo elevator and it began lowering with a shudder that vibrated through the shuttle’s hull and forced Sandi to catch her balance on the bulkhead.
“Damn it, Frankie!” Deruda stalked up behind the slender, long-limbed older man, his perpetual frown deepening. He’d stopped by the utility locker and was carrying a light carbine tucked under his arm and a spare pistol in the other hand. “I’ve told you a million times to wait until I make sure it’s our people before you drop the cargo!”
“Aye, Captain,” Frankie answered cheerfully. With an agility that was impressive for his age, the cargo-handler hopped out onto one of the plastic crates on the lowering freight elevator and grabbed a cable for support. “I’ll check on ‘em and if it’s not our crew, I’ll tell ‘em to go back home.”
Deruda looked like he wanted to yell at the man again, but Frankie’s Cheshire-cat grin disappeared along with the pallets of cargo and the Captain just growled deep in his throat.
“Come on, Hollande,” he snapped at Sandi, waving for her to follow as he headed for the ladder that had extended downward along with the belly doors.
“Come on where?” She wondered, following him. “Can’t they unload it by themselves?”
A cold, damp blast of rain-sodden wind hit her as she clambered down behind the rotund man, dropping to the ground with a crunch of her boots on the gravel. She fastened her flight jacket up the front, her fingers automatically tracing the blank spots where her rank and the Commonwealth Space Fleet patch used to be.
The crew of a half-dozen locals were already hand-loading the crates into the backs of the two cargo trucks they’d brought, alcohol-fueled antiques probably slapped together from spare parts. An armored car of some sort was parked facing the trucks and the interplay of the headlights threw ominous shadows against the light grey of the belly plastrons and hid the men’s faces from her view.
“We’re escorting this load into town,” Deruda answered her question, slipping a knit cap on over his unruly, red mane. “I need to have a talk with the local crew boss.”
“Why do I have to come?” Sandi objected, following him around to the passenger door of the armored car. He rounded on her with narrowed eyes.
“Because I said so,” he told her flatly. “And because there might be trouble.”
He shoved the pistol he’d taken out of the utility locker at her and she took it without thinking, automatically running through a safety check. It was loaded, a round chambered, safety on.
“You know I’m a pilot, right?” She asked him, gesturing at the pistol with her off-hand but keeping it pointed at the ground. “Not a Marine.”
“You’re whatever we need you to be,” he snapped. He jerked a thumb at the rear truck. “You’re riding back there.”
Sandi looked at the pistol, then at Deruda’s back as the man squeezed himself into the cab of the armored car, and very carefully did not point it at him. Though it made a nice fantasy… She hissed out a breath and headed back to the truck.