The Science Officer

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I’ve been writing a whole bunch over the last half year in the Alexandria Station universe, mostly concentrated on the far end of the calendar, specifically Jessica Keller and Henri Baudin (a name you’ll meet next week when The Story Road drops). It dawns on me that I really haven’t spent a lot of time on Javier Aritza lately. Partly, that’s because Jessica has been all-consuming, like and an itch I can’t scratch.

It’s my plan (still on plan, btw) to work on the third episode of The Science Officer once I finish the first Jessica Keller Trilogy (update: about halfway through Last Of The Immortals, and Queen Of The Pirates is coming out in August).

We left our indomitable hero at the end of The Mind Field, right after Sykora has departed with Wilhelmina Teague, returning to that place called civilization. Javier has made his peace with his lot in life, currently. Suvi is mostly safe from discovery. Javier has decided that he can make a life with the rest of the crew, once he figures out how to deal with Sykora.

I’ve had a lot of comments from people who expect the two of them, Javier and Djamila, to end up as an item together. That may entirely happen, but I hope you aren’t holding your breath.

Those two hate each other.  I mean, planning on how to make it look like an accident kinds of hatred. There are a lot of ways to wrap that up in a pretty bow, but there is a lot of animus there. The Concord is a very sexist place, relegating women frequently to a second-class status. It is also a very status-conscious place, more like part of modern South Asia, or parts of the UK, where it is extremely difficult to overcome the situation of your birth. Javier is a guy, and he comes from a planet that is pretty well connected.

Sykora, however, comes from a much different place. Neu Berne is a very Teutonic kind of place. Their militarism was a driving force in the Great War that just ended 80 years ago, shattering all major powers in such a way that The Concord kind of had to step in and take over. She was a tall, kind of dorky girl from the wrong side of the tracks as a youngster, who rose as far as she could by being as close to edge of human physical perfection as one could get, but she would never make it any farther, except as a trophy wife. And suggesting that to Djamila is a good way to get bones broken.

For her, Javier is almost everything she has been fighting against for her whole life. That he’s a sarcastic, mouthy sh*t around her does not help things.

Finally, I’m the writer, and, unlike other things I write, I see this as a tremendously long arc of stories that need to be told. In my head, The Science Officer is just the first episode of a very long television show on cable, maybe broken into arcs in the way the old Dr Who episodes used to be (and I mean the first  Seven Doctors here). It is the Pilot episode, if you will. The Mind Field could be considered to be the first episode of Series One. I already know what the next story will be about, although I have no idea what it is named yet.

In many television shows, the best parts are always related to the tension that arises between two characters they that might otherwise be attracted to each other, but who have a hatred that evolves. The best shows evolve that into a rivalry that eventually grows into respect. With luck, they drag that out for a long time, with the “will they? won’t they?” aspects keeping the audience on the edge of their chairs. For those of you old enough to remember the show, think about how Moonlighting handled it.

For me, I plan to write a lot more stories about Javier and Suvi and the crew of the Storm Gauntlet. The crew dynamics fascinate me, as you have this complete outsider who probably could turn his life around and become an up-standing galactic citizen if he left, surrounded by people who are not scum and dregs, but generally down-on-their-luck following the end of the war. The economy has not recovered, but it will one of these days. For now, they are just making their way.

And it’s not that I don’t see Javier and Sykora’s relationship changing over time. Both are extremely competent people, doing what they want to do, and doing it well. But there are powerful tides at play that will have to work themselves out. Plus, I get mortally offended at the common trope that the girl is supposed to immediately fall in love with the leading man and betray herself, her side, and everything she believes in, just for a chance to win his love. (See Bond, J, most of for really cheesy examples thereto).

Djamila is a warrior. An Amazon in exactly the way the Hellenes saw them, three millennia ago. Bad-ass warrior babes from north-east of what we call today the Black Sea, who do not need a man to give them worth and definition. Or the Etruscans. Or the Vikings. Neu Berne does not appreciate a woman like that, except as a trained attack dog.

Javier is a twice-divorced goofball who doesn’t much like people, being around them, answering to them, behaving by their rules.

To him, she’s just another stick-up-the-butt authority figures that he instinctively rebels against. To her, he’s just another man-child coasting on the benefits of his birth and up-bringing, and refusing to take anything seriously.

But l like them both. And I have several more episodes to write to see where they will take me. After all, Javier will have been born 5,895 years before Jessica Keller. I have space into which to put stories. Way more stories. Yet more people who have not yet introduced themselves.

They all fit in a nice happy little bucket, with room to play, while at the same time leaving room for everyone else, in their on slot of history.

After all, Suvi is the only one who gets to live forever.

Imposters

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Yay!!!!

After waiting so long and staring at that cover sitting on my desk, probably mocking me, Imposters is finally available for sale at all the usual suspects.

A bit of backstory, for those of you not playing along at home: I wrote The Shipwrecked Mermaid for an anthology that came out this last spring (Tales From An Alien Campfire). When writerbrain decided to write something longer, it latched on to Rick Pine and went totally Thriller SF on me.

Both stories are in a new universe, not Alexandria Station, but The Collective. This one is filled with aliens of all flavors, mostly watching us and trying to decide if we are the most dangerous species in the galaxy, or if we might grow up and become good little galactic citizens. There are folks up there that would just as soon wipe us out and keep a perfectly nice planet as real estate to colonize.

One day, one of them goes bug nuts and starts killing humans, convinced he can make humanity a better place if he gets rid of all the criminal deviants. At that point, it’s a race against the clock to stop him, without the Seattle Police Department tumbling to what’s REALLY going on. (Only fools fight in a burning house, if you will.)

Fabulous Publisher Babe really likes the three voicey women in this one: Laurie, Bethany, and Eleanora. I think it turned out really cool. Total thriller pacing, meaning you’ll eat the damned thing like ice cream and hit the bottom of the bowl before you realize it. It is also short for a novel, clocking in around 45k words. (Auberon is 60k. Queen Of The Pirates will be 95k. Science Officer and Mind Field are both 24k for comparison.)

Haven’t figured out where to take the story next. Or rather, have been steadfastly refusing to listen to writerbrain’s suggestions. Got too many other things I owe you folks before I go haring off on other projects. Hopefully. Popcorn Kittens, and all that.

Hope y’all will enjoy it as much to read as I did to write.

Reminder that there’s a section in the middle where we get NC-17 for a few pages, so be prepared, if you bought it for your 13-year-old, to have them come ask some awkward questions. (Or not, if you’ve been doing your job up until now, then they’re just going to ask if it’s really like that, when things get to that point.) But it’s only one scene, only a few pages, and then we’re back to car chases, gun fights , and snark to the explosive ending.

Lemme know what you think.

shade and sweet water,

b

Valse d’Glaive

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Jessica Keller practices a form of close-combat martial art known as Valse d’Glaive, the Sword Dance. In the distant future of her time, mankind has been exploring the galaxy for nearly ten thousand years. The Homeworld was destroyed by bolide attack, nearly three thousand years ago. What is left is a interesting melting pot jumble of stuff.

The art draws heavily on two radically unrelated fighting arts. The first is the Chinese art known as Tai Chi, which at once was a fighting art and a form of meditation in motion. At least, that’s the way I was taught it, once upon a time. Slow, ritualized movements that are practiced until they become automatic. You will often see people in the park, early in the morning, stepping slowly through the movements, keeping their minds, bodies and souls limber.

The other art that contributed is Florentine-style fencing, although done here with a long and short instead of two long. Many people are familiar with the more traditional single-blade form, mostly from watching Musketeer movies. In Florentine, the practitioner holds two blades, fighting equally with both hands.

At some point in the future, a master becomes a sensei and combines his knowledge of the two forms in a tao, the black and white circles chasing each other. Formal, ritualized movements. The step, the block, the strike, the counter. Now, however, done with blades. Two blades.

The first blade, traditionally the right-hand weapon, is the Saber. This is the attacking weapon, the slashing one. It is a straight weapon, single-edged, nearly a meter in length, but with a fairly light blade, compared to the more-sturdily constructed northwest European blades. This saber is more like a cavalry saber from the nineteenth century, except straight. If you are familiar such a thing, something very much akin to the US Marine Corps NCO Dress Saber, down to the basket hilt.

The shorter blade is the main-gauche, literally the left hand. It is much shorter, measuring around forty centimeters in overall length, with a much heavier blade, edged on both sides, with a strong cross-guard to protect the knuckles. This is the “defensive” blade, used to protect by shielding and blocking. However, it can be used to kill.

Traditionally, both weapons for fighting are forged from high-quality steel. There are much more interesting and exotic alloys that could be used, but Valse d’Glaive is not a field combat art, although it can be. Instead, it is an art for the gymnasium, the dojo, or the garden. Those who practice the art are expected to treat it with the dignity tied to such an ancient art form, although it is taught to warriors who are expected to fight.

In the case of Jessica Keller, because she is left handed, she wields the saber in her left hand, mirroring a more traditional fighter. She compensates for this by using a training automaton that is capable of using either hand equally well, and may fight with a longer blade in either hand, or occasionally the full-sized (traditional Florentine-length) training blade (round plastic wrapped in foam that will still leave a welt) in both hands. When fighting the ‘bot, she also uses training blades. After all, it’s bad form for someone to learn to pull a blow during training, lest those habits continue into the real world.

The fighting robot is not sentient. It is a particularly-capable idiot box, a machine that can play chess at high speed, but it has no sense of self. It is configured to train at a number of different skill sets, engaging from level Zero all the way up to level Ten, although there are less than a handful of masters in the Republic of Aquitaine who can routinely defeat the machine at the level Eight setting.

Combat begins in a cleared space generally ten to twelve meters across and usually round or oval in shape. The student will activate the fighting robot verbally, setting the difficult level. “Fighting Robot activate. Challenge Rating Four.” The machine will awaken, process the command, and reply “Combat Mode initiated. Challenge Rating Four confirmed.”

At that point, combat begins and will continue to the first contact, either the robot touching the student, or the student scoring a hit. This resets the machine, although the student can activate an override setting that will go to the second contact, if the first is not judged to have been serious.

A full training session goes to Fifteen points. At the point where the student routinely scores a Nine (9/15), they are encouraged to begin training at the next higher level of difficulty, until they reach a stage where their skill plateaus. As noted earlier, Masters of the Valse d’Glaive routinely fight the machine at rating Eight.

One final note about the art form. Unlike most Blade-Combat arts, Valse d’Glaive teaches students to use gymnastics and acrobatic movements similar to more traditional unarmed styles when fighting. This includes trips, squats, tumbles, and cartwheels to evade contact and to place your enemy in an awkward position. This runs counter to most sword forms, where the common soldier is expected to hold their position as part of a line of troops moving in unison.

Jessica Keller excels at this form because she is a gymnast as well as a close-quarters fighter. Her short stature works to her advantage, allowing her to move in a faster and more combat motion. This compliments her training in three dimensional fleet movements, where down is a relative term and “sides” are non-existent. She is ambidextrous, able to use both blades equally well, to kill with either hand.

What about the reader

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I talk a lot to writers. I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember, but I’ve only really turned myself into a writer over the course of the last year and a half. At first, I was writing pure fantasy because I’ve been into fantasy (and other) rpg’s since grade school (yeah, a while ago).

After two collections of fantasy (Beyond The Mirror 1 & 2), I turned to write some SF. The inspiration for me was the story Greater Than The Gods Intended, which starts out as pure high fantasy and suckers you in quite a ways before you realize it is really hard SF. (And I do mean hard.  All the science is there right now, fully explainable and defensible.)

You’ve heard me kvetch in other places about not being able to find the sorts of fiction I want to read, leading/forcing me to go out and write it. I’ve heard other writers say the same things. In many ways, that is the impetus to become an actual writer instead of just playing.

But what about the reader? What do they want?

Manhattan Publishing (what I call TradPub because it represents the last five major publishers after they ate each other starting around 1990) is busy churning out a slew of new books every year, throwing things at a wall like wet spaghetti to see what sticks. When it does, everyone goes all in, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery meets the cut-throat nature of a very expensive industry.

Thus, two decades ago, young wizards in modern urban fantasy became huge “overnight” after JK changed the world of reading by making stories that grown-ups enjoyed as well. After that, stories about vampires (and all the rest of the previously-“bad” monsters of literature) took over for a stretch. Distopian/Post-Apocalyptic took off after Suzanne’s excellent look at one possible future. And those were just the biggest of the big.

If you come down a notch, Young Adult (YA) urban fantasy or science fiction has never been far from the top. Wander the aisles of your favorite book dealer (new or used) and gander at all the young girls in mid-riff-baring tops, either with a sword in one hand, or and beginnings of a hex, in some dark urban alleyway (presumably New York-ish). Or the dude in the cowboy hat doing the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it is absolutely awesome that so many people are reading these days. Even if you don’t read my stuff, every person who reads keeps a book store in business. Or talks books with a friend (who may like me, or maybe they find something in a used book store that looks enticing, with my name on it).

What I’m interested in is how the reader approaches their to-read list. (I won’t ever “write to market,” that is, identify what is hot right now and right something specifically geared to sell on that wave. Creative muse doesn’t work that way, anyway.)

Scienticians have identified three general archetypes of The Reader(tm)

The first group is the “Social” reader. This is the person that picks up maybe one book per year, because that is THE book to be reading. This is the person who read the first Fifty Shades book last year, because everyone was reading it and they either wanted to see what the hype was, or, more likely, wanted to be seen reading the latest hip, trendy fashion.

TradPub makes almost all of their money from the Social reader. They may only buy one book, but that group is usually millions of readers. This is the sort of thing that makes a novel enter the cultural zeitgeist.

The second group is the “Casual” reader. This person reads a dozen or two books per year, generally safely within a few particular genre, say, mystery, or SF, or fantasy, and doesn’t necessarily branch out much, unless they get a recommendation from a friend, or find an author has crossed over.

I don’t read a lot of fantasy any more, because I find it frequently formulaic and derivative. But a while back David Drake did his Isles series, so I had to read it all. Mostly enjoyed it, but I prefer his SF. For other readers it is the same way. They might dabble, but they come home eventually.

The third group is the “Voracious” reader. I live for this kind of person. When they find a new author they like, they quickly sit down and read everything that author has published. Woe unto you if you have only a small bakery of selections when they come in the door, instead of  muffins, and donuts, and coffee, and whiskey. I can tell when someone like that hits my back list, because I’ll sell some of the more obscure titles out of the blue. In a week, I’ll see one of everything go. (To date, I have never actually hit a true Otaku-grade collector, because I have one title that has never sold a single copy individually, only as part of one of the Beyond The Mirror collections.)

If you’ve read this far, I’m interested in what kind of reader you are. How many books do you read in a month, or year? What genre lights your fires? How did you come to know me or my works? (As I wind down the first Jessica Keller trilogy, what would you like to see more of?)

I enjoy hearing from the people in range of my voice. PLEASE feel free to drop me a note at blaze at blaze ward dot com and let me know. Who knows, as I’m listening for the next muse in the fall, your voice might be the one that tips me over towards one of about a dozen possible projects turning to gumbo in my writer-brain.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

A Summer Of Fun

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Those of you who have been playing along at home are aware that Auberon was the first step of what I plan to be a very busy summer. As of this week (I wasn’t exactly paying attention), Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) put the next piece of the puzzle on the interwebs.

Imposters is now available for pre-order on (so far) Kobo, Amazon, and iTunes.

Some background: Last summer, I was invited to participate in a closed anthology (by invitation only instead of taking submissions), edited by Irene Radford. The story I submitted was The Shipwrecked Mermaid. Last winter, I decided to write a novel (my first, by the way) and decided to write a sequel kind of story to Mermaid, picking up with Rick after he got out of prison and was working to make something useful and positive out of his life.

Unlike Auberon, which is pure military Science Fiction, Imposters if very much a modern/sci-fi thriller kind of story, an action piece on Earth in an entirely different universe, one populated by all manner of interesting alien beings hiding among us, studying us, watching.

More importantly, the material is a bit more, uhm, mature in parts. As in, there is a section in the middle, about five pages long, that is probably not appropriate for your thirteen year old to read.  Your sixteen year old probably knows these things, assuming you’ve been doing your job, but I want to make sure people know going in.

I’ve always said that most of what I write is appropriate for my own target audience, who will be fourteen this year, but that there will be exceptions from time to time. In the case of Rick and Laurie, we have one of the exceptions.

Here there be dragons…

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After Imposters, the next major release will be The Story Road, starring Henri Baudin as the man who founded the Republic of Aquitaine, four centuries before Jessica Keller and Auberon. This is another Alexandria Station novella, clocking in at around 25k words, and is the first of an occasional set that will come along as I need them. Need? Yes, need.

The Story Road resulted from a conversation that takes place fairly late in Queen Of The Pirates, the second Jessica Keller novel (which has gone to the printer. YAY), between Jessica and Arnulf Rodriguez, the King Of The Pirates. Arnulf asks her about the Founding Legends of the Republic.

What is a Founding Legend?

In this country, George Washington is a Founding Legend. Ben Franklin, Man of Science. Lafayette. The Battle of Lexington. The Battle of Saratoga. The Battle of Yorktown. Ethan Allen and Green Mountain Boys. These all make up an arc of stories about a supposed rag-tag group of colonists taking on the most powerful empire in history. And beating them.

Henri Baudin will fill the role of George Washington, in this distant future of which I dream. He is a Bard, a musician, a traveler. He does not set out to change the course of human civilization, but kinda stumbles into it. He is helped along by Suvi, marking her return nearly a thousand years after The Librarian.

And yes, I was able to talk Matt Weight  into returning to do the audio book for The Story Road. It should come out at the same time that the ebook and print version do, in late June.

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Finally, as I mentioned above, Queen Of The Pirates has gone to the printer. I am assured that it will be coming out the week before Sasquan (the world fantasy con in Spokane in August). I am hard at work on the third book in the initial Jessica Keller trilogy, Last Of The Immortals. (If you’ve been paying attention along the way, you know who the special guest star will be, based on the title alone.) This one will be coming out at the end of October, just in time for OryCon down in Portland, in early November.

Hope you are having a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

shade and sweet water…

blaze

Auberon: Beams and Missiles

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So last week, I geeked out on carriers.

This week, I want to talk about offensive firepower in the way distant future. I thought about coming up with a fun and exciting name for the various classes of beam weapons, like several movie and TV show universes have, but in the end, I realized that the Republic of Aquitaine is a fairly technical place, in spite of their Founding Legends.

The smallest beam weapon is the Type-1 beam. This is a short-range weapon, pretty small, and usually mounted in fighters or escorts. In Auberon, the M-5 Harpoon melee fighter has a triple Type-1 installation. That means one on each wing, and one mounted centerline, all facing forward. The outer two also parallax in, so when you get a lock on someone and open up, all three should come to something of a focus at the point of impact. When dog-fighting, the triple beam will eventually knock down shields and get a kill, if the other pilot can’t get away.

Defensively, an escort like CR-264, which is a converted Revenue Cutter, mounts several Type-1’s in turrets with good arcs. CR-264 specifically has four Type-1’s, which is not much, compared to the GunShip Necromancer. CR-264 is much bigger than the GunShip, however, and has better shields and way more comfortable sailing. Escorts and Destroyers use the Type-1 to kill missiles and drive off melee fighters.

The next weapon up is the Type-2 beam. This is larger weapon, and will rarely be mounted on a fighter craft. Auberon carries a pair of S-11 Orca medium bombers that each have a single Type-2 in a fixed mount. (They also have a twin Type-1 in a turret with a single gunner, mostly for defense against melee fighters.) Necromancer has a triple Type-2 (wings and nose like the M-5 Harpoon has with the Type-1), but she is designed to go up against bombers, DropShips, and GunShips, as well as tangle with the smaller escorts an enemy fleet might field.

The Type-2 is a lovely weapon to kill melee fighters and missiles with, having range and hitting power. CR-264 has two of them, Dorsal and Ventral in turrets.

The Type-3 is the weapon of warships. It can be used to hunt melee fighters and bombers, but they tend to be nimble enough to evade fire from the big guns, unless you get lucky. Instead, the Type-3 is intended to batter down the shields of an enemy vessel. It has the most range of the beams, and the most hitting power. CR-264 has no Type-3’s, while Rajput has four and Auberon has two. And remember, Rajput is an up-gunned Destroyer, and an unsuccessful design at that, while Auberon is a Strike Carrier built on a Heavy Cruiser hull. A Republic Heavy Cruiser, for scale, will have six Type-3’s and a Battlecruiser will have eight.

Finally, there is the Primary Beam. This weapon is different from the other beam weapons, in that it requires ammunition. The weapon was invented when someone accidentally overloaded a Type-3 and drilled a hole partway through a nearby moon. Where a warship can fire the beam weapons (1-3) all day, they have a limited number of Primaries. These weapons, however, hit an order of magnitude harder.

Think of each one as a cartridge for a gun. It contains a firing mechanism, a lasing focus, and a generator filled with fast-burning fuel. When you fire it, it uses up the mechanism, and you can either eject it into space as trash, or haul it home and recycle it. Aquitaine normally recycles the weapons.

Auberon has two Primary mounts, instead of the four of a Heavy Cruiser or six of a Battlecruiser, but she retains the two because she is expected to go into combat with Cruisers and hold her own when she does. Rajput has three Primary mounts, where a Destroyer or Destroyer Leader only has two. She also has a larger armoury for shells, which is part of the reason the vessel is so cramped.

However, you kill enemy vessels with missiles, not beams. Crecy or Agincourt, not Trafalgar.

The Republic of Aquitaine has a variety of missile types available, and they tend to be named after birds of prey from the now-lost Homeworld. The Hawk is the standard missile of the Fleet, with a regulation warhead and guidance systems.

The Eagle is a longer-ranged variant of the Hawk, where explosives for the warhead has been reduced in favor of greater fuel and endurance.

The Crow is commonly referred to by Republic crews as the Shot or Murder. Instead of an explosive warhead, this missile contains four smaller missiles inside. After the weapon is launched, it can be programmed to deploy by opening the sides like a flower. Each of the four sub-munitions is fairly short-ranged, and has a small warhead. They are used primarily defensively, where each of the four shots can be targeted at an incoming missile with a very high kill-ratio. Against a melee fighter, one of the Shot sub-munitions will likely shred the craft’s shields, although it probably won’t damage the craft much. Two of them should score a kill.

The Barn Owl is a stealth missile. Auberon tends to use them at the time when it is launching a pair of fighters from the forward tubes, or crash launching the entire wing. Enemy scanners are unlikely to pick the missile up against such a noisy background. The missile does not use scanners. Instead, it is programmed to follow a particular course, passively scanning for emissions from a target, and then actively running down the target. They are shorter-range than a Hawk, and the lack of active scanners, and the lesser fuel load, means that they have a much larger warhead. If you can get one in and catch the other guy off guard, you can kick his shields in, or shatter a smaller vessel if they have lost their shields.

The Vulture is an armored missile. Instead of being killed by a Type-1 beam or a Shot sub-munition, it might take two. The warhead on a Vulture is smaller, but they are primarily used is a larger wave, to cause gunners to panic when hits don’t kill.

Lastly, Aquitaine uses the Osprey. This is a very heavy, slow missile, normally used at the end of a battle as a coup de grace against a warship that has been damaged enough to not fight back. It lacks speed, because everything is in the warhead. It can kill a battleship if it hits home.

This now concludes today’s lessons in Armaments. Please let me know if you have any questions.

The Republic of Aquitaine Carriers

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Today, boys and girls, I wanted to geek out a little. Just a little. Call it a tour in world-building. Some writers talk about how they write, or why, and I do that. But I really wanted to spend some time inside the place I have spent so much time lately.

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Auberon is an Republic of Aquitaine (RAN) Strike Carrier. She was designed to a complement to fleet Heavy Cruisers, being built on the same general hull. This means she is as fast as a heavy cruiser, and has some offensive armaments. In this case, two Primary mounts and two Type-3 beams, where a standard Heavy Cruiser has four and six respectively. On engines and shields, she is comparable.

Additionally, a Strike Carrier normally carries nine fighter craft, arranged in three groups of three, with a lead and two wings. (For comparison’s sake, the Fribourg Empire flies squadrons of twelve in pairs and fours.) On most Strike Carriers, the Flight Wing consists of nine fighters of a single type, or sometimes one of the wings will be swapped out for a Special Operations section.

This is what Auberon is like when Jessica Keller takes command. Six fighter craft (M-5 Harpoons instead of the more advanced M-6 Gungnirs) in two wings. However, for reasons never explained adequately by the records, the third wing consists of a single P-4 Outrider as a scout, flown by Senior Flight Centurion Ainsley Barret, and the two S-11 Orca medium bombers, Damocles and Starfall, commanded by Leila Ketevan and Edgar Khachaturian respectively.

Where things get weird is in the shuttle bay. Normally, a Strike Carrier has three utility shuttles. Think big straight trucks or small semi rigs. They’re for hauling things and people around, safely, but with not much comfort. On the frontiers, especially the quiet ones, a ship might have to scrounge, or might find something interesting and decide to use it. Thus, Auberon.

Instead of the normal three shuttles, the bay has been reconfigured and expanded to accommodate a Kartikeya-class GunShip, Necromancer, and a Nightshade-class DropShip (Assault Shuttle), Cayenne.

Kilo for Kilo, Necromancer is actually better armed than the former Revenue Cutter CR-264, in terms of guns and missiles. She does not have Jumpdrives, nor the ability to go on long sails, being a short-range, short-duty killing machine.

Cayenne is, for all intents and purposes, almost a medium freighter for size, but not cargo capacity. She is designed to deploy a company of marines into close combat, or a platoon of marines and two armored fighting vehicles. As such, she has good shields, thick armor on her belly, and weapon racks and a ventral turret for support. And a crazy pilot, Hollis Dyson, Gaucho.

However, the Strike Carrier design is not a very common one. It has not proven to be generally successful, because it requires a Command Centurion willing and able to take the vessel into direct combat with other vessels, something that most Carrier commanders do not have experience with.

There are several other RAN Carrier designs. Smallest is the Pocket Carrier, built on the same hull as a Destroyer, minus the Primary mounts and Type-3 beams, but with more missile tubes and a single Wing of three fighters. The Pocket Carrier usually operates as part of a Destroyer Squadron of three vessels, providing a scouting, melee, or heavy element depending on the type of fighters flown.

Next largest is the Escort Carrier, built on a Light Cruiser hull. This vessel flies two wings, for a total of six fighters, at a loss of most of the Light Cruiser’s offensive firepower. Interestingly, this class of vessel is frequently attached to Carrier Task Forces as an escort, where it can range far afield of the Fleet Carriers and support a very large Flight Wing without requiring them to return to the main vessel.

At the Heavy Cruiser range, the Republic of Aquitaine Navy also has four vessels classed as Hospital ships, where they will add medical facilities instead of missile storage, and carry a six shuttles and a Mobile Hospital, an Assault Shuttle-sized DropShip with a self-contained Emergency Surgery facility that can be dropped right into a disaster zone to provide medical services.

Finally, the Queens of the battlefield, the Fleet Carriers. They are of a size with Dreadnaughts, but are purpose-built from the keel up. In a manner similar to the Strike Carrier, the Fleet Carrier carries some offensive armaments, namely two Primary mounts, and four Type-3, to go with a forest of Type-2 and Type-1 beams. However, the Fleet Carrier’s power lies in three Flight Wings, twenty-seven fighters, almost always M-6 Gungnir’s, the top of the line. Without escorts such as corvettes and light cruisers, that many melee fighters could annihilate Fribourg Empire Battleship. RAN Ajax and RAN Archon are two examples of the Fleet Carrier design.

Built on the same hull as the Fleet Carrier is the Assault Carrier. This is a Command and Control vessel that sacrifices all of the offensive armaments (but none of the defense) in favor of a Wing of medium bombers, an entire squadron of DropShips and an elite armored regiment.

One last note. The Republic of Aquitaine Navy currently has one Dominator-class Space Control Ship, the RAN Athena. As the RAN Flag, this gigantic vessel combines the firepower of a line dreadnaught with an entire Flight Wing from a Fleet Carrier. While she rarely sees combat, her crew is composed of the very best the entire RAN Fleet has to pick from.

I have a novel…

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Auberon
After all the work, and all the planning, and all the waiting, I have a novel coming out this week, generally available this Tuesday. I’m still kinda boggled by the whole thing. On the one hand, I have around thirty titles published to date, and this is just the next one in the line. On the other hand, this one is a novel, and my first. And the first of many.

I’m still in shock. Hopefully you’ll bear with with me.

Last fall, I was talking to Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) about what I should concentrate on for 2015. I was then finishing up what would become the third Beyond The Mirror collection, Alternate Worlds. My brain had happily transitioned to science fiction and gone completely to town. She looked at me as Marketing Executive and said, “Novels.”

Independent bookstores occasionally have her in for signings and readings. She did one last fall in Oregon at a Powell’s Books where they had twenty or so authors all signing books for readers to buy. (Sunday night after OryCon.) All of those people had written shorter fiction, many of them very successfully, but they were there on the basis of novels. Bookstores only want to deal with novel-length pieces. Easier for inventory. And some writers can be a bit snobbish about that sort of thing.

So I finished the projects at hand and wrote Imposters. After that, Auberon. I have Queen Of The Pirates in edit mode right now, and I’ll start Last Of The Immortals shortly, which means I will have four novels out by the end of 2015, plus several novellas (The Mind Field, and The Story Road at the very least), and several short stories.

And in a few days, Auberon will be for sale. And a few weeks after that, Imposters.

Wow. Dunno how else to put it.

Weirder, I have actual fans, and they send me fan mail. The writer behind the website 21AAR sent me a wonderful thank you in response to the quarterly newsletter. That made my whole weekend. He even offered to post a banner for me on his website, because he thought that my Alternate History SF (Valeriya and Tatiyana, plus Moscow Gold) would be interesting to his readers. (Those of you who like hard, sharp, pointy things that go boom will really enjoy his site.)

And next weekend, I’m having a party to celebrate Auberon, with whoever wants to come up to Capital Hill in Seattle for some cupcakes and ice cream. There might even be cool posters and wine. And books to sign.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) told me it would be like this, one of these days. I just didn’t comprehend what it all meant. I’m usually the supportive spouse. And those of you who know me know that I don’t do Life of the Party well. But I’m working on it. Promise.

Still. I have a novel coming out. A First Novel(tm) to be followed by several more. And its kinda awesome…

What Is Alexandria Station?

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You’ve heard me talk about it as a place, a concept, and a universe.  Figured I’d cover all three and let everyone have a brief look inside the weirdness that is my head.

First: Universe. In my notes, I have four different sets of “worlds” i want to write Science Fiction in. So far. Like, today before lunch. Ask me again tomorrow and the number has probably gone up. It does that. The key signal to Alexandria Station, as I talked about last week, is the total lack of alien species that have been discovered to be interacted with. Humans, today, and for at least the next 13,500 years, are alone. Who knows what happens after that. I haven’t gotten that far in my notes.

This universe contains several characters and arcs. Javier Aritza. Doyle Iwakuma. Henri Baudin. Jessica Keller. But most importantly, Suvi. The AI whose name means Summer. She was Javier’s Probe-Cutter, Mielikki. She was The Librarian. She is the Provost of the University of Ballard. She will be the Last of the Immortals. When I talk about Alexandria Station, I mean one of the many stories with one of these characters, and several others I plan to write one of these days.

Next: Concept. Historically, there was a great center of learning located in ancient times in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. It is known to have been “destroyed” at some point, although nobody agrees when or by whom, with blame alternatively being placed on Julius Caesar, the Roman Emperor Aurelian, the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria, or Caliph Omar. While no one knows the truth at this point, we do know it was gone by some point in ancient history.

When Doyle rescues Suvi at Kel Sdala, she had already become a librarian, but on a world that had fallen into utter bronze-age barbarism. On the way to Ballard, she decides that she wants to continue to be a librarian, since she has the collected knowledge of the lost Homeworld, and because they will never allow her to be a starship again, after what the AI fleets did.

Finally: Place. The University of Ballard is a school of higher-learning, located aboard a station orbiting the equator of Ballard. It is contained in a larger facility, known as Alexandria Station. Suvi is the Provost of the University, wired directly into most of the learning spaces and at home in the library, which is a mix of electronic books stored in her core, and physical books, roughly half of which are printed from her core, and half of which were brought here and scanned in afterwards.

Like any university, it is an eclectic mix of professors and students, with the addition that Suvi, as an AI, can appear in many places at once, both as a student and a guest lecturer. She no longer teaches students directly, unless it is on a topic that is so obscure that nobody else knows, including many facets of human history where she was actually there to witness it, or at least heard things first hand. Henri Baudin, in the upcoming novella, The Story Road, studies astrophysics while teaching music.

The station itself is a large sphere in orbit. It is not Geo-synchronous with the ground, moving much faster. This was important when it was built, because the university it houses is for all of Ballard, and not just Ithome, Doyle’s home city. It has come to represent all of the planet, simply because everyone can look up at night and see it passing overhead, if they are far enough from the bright lights. Ballard certainly has other universities and colleges, but Alexandria Station is preeminent.

In time, it becomes one of the jewels on the Story Road, because people travel there to discover, bringing with them their own culture and stories, and transmitting back what they have learned. Think of the Silk Road that once bound the city-states of the Mediterranean Sea with what we know today as China. Exotic things traveled that road in both directions, letting radically different cultures communicate.

In Jessica’s time, the Story Road has faded in importance, past by as technology, culture, and humans have moved on to different wants, different needs. Other worlds have risen and become more important. The Republic of Aquitaine has absorbed the four worlds that originally made up the Story Road: Ballard, Pohang, Saxon, and Zanzibar; and they are now in a quiet, somewhat forgotten corner of the galaxy.

Originally, this remoteness, this isolation from the key travel corridors, is what caused these worlds to survive, when so many others fell after the Homeworld was destroyed. They had to be self-sufficient almost from the moment they were colonized. And each of the four descended from Homeworld cultures with strong maritime traditions: Scandinavia, Britannia, East Africa, and Korea. Thus, they survived two thousand years of darkness, until they could return to space, starting with Zanzibar, and accelerating with the help of the Provost from the University of Ballard.

So when I talk about Alexandria Station, I mean many things, but all of them rotate around the universe that contains it. (As a contrast, Rick Pine, in The Shipwrecked Mermaid, and the upcoming novel Imposters, exists in a universe known as The Collective. There are aliens. They live among us, trying to understand us so they can eventually help us become the sort of sentient species that they could welcome into the broader galactic civilization.)

But Alexandria Station is special. Suvi lives there.

Are we alone?

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So when you first set your butt in the chair and decide to write Science Fiction ™, this is one of the first questions you have to ask yourself. Are we alone?

In Fantasy, in almost all flavors, the answer is “duh, no.” because you have elves, and dragons, and unicorns, and lycanthropes, and vampires everywhere, even in Urban (modern) Fantasy. In horror, the bad guy is almost always something other than human.

But in Science Fiction, when you get out into space, you have to ask: Is there anyone out there to talk to? If there are no other intelligent species to encounter, why not? Are we unique? Or have the others come and gone and left no trace? (Jack McDevitt does an awesome job, by the way, exploring this topic with his Hutch novels.)

Or perhaps they have not made it up the technology ladder (yet) and are still at some “primitive” level. Thus, the Prime Directive.

But as humans work their way into space, you as the author have to decide what they find out there. If there are other people in space, why have we not encountered them yet?  Perhaps they have their own  Prime Directive that keeps them from letting us know until we’re ready? Thus, the Fermi Paradox.

A theory I share with a buddy of mine got incorporated into the universe of The Collective, containing The Shipwrecked Mermaid and Imposters (so far). They are out there, but consider mankind to be dangerous homicidal lunatics best kept isolated until their either destroy themselves or grow up, if the latter is possible. We are watched. Aliens walk (and swim) among us, but they keep a very low profile and keep everything as secret as possible. Both of the Rick Pine stories that I have written so far explore what happens to that theory when something goes terribly wrong.

At the other end of the spectrum, every day scientists find new theories of how strangely unique our homeworld planet it, compared to other systems we can study, which lends itself to the theory that organized life capable of technology is likely to be fairly rare. Recently, scientists noticed how many really big planets were extremely close to their parent star. Say, Jupiter at Mercury’s orbit. No smaller planets would survive a system like that, unless they ended up as moons of a brown dwarf like Jupiter. Their current theory is that Jupiter swept in at some point and smashed up all the (smaller) big worlds in close, leaving behind just a little rocky mass from which to form four small planets and the asteroid belt.

Similarly, we have a moon that is huge in comparison to the Earth (Charon and Pluto come to mind for a comparison). Etc. Etc. Etc.

So maybe we’re alone in space. Or there are only a few other places where the conditions will be ripe for a technological civilization to occur. And of those, only a few will manage to make it safely off of one planet before disease, bad luck, or atomic weaponry end them as a civilization and possibly as a species.

This is the basis for the Alexandria Station universe. (Science Officer, Mind Field, Librarian, Greater Than The Gods Intended, Auberon, Queen Of The Pirates, etc.) There is nobody else out there.

Eleven thousand years of exploring and humans have found no trace of others. Which is not so say nobody has ever come along. David Drake is an absolute master of throwing in something obviously older than mankind, tucked away in some place where his characters find it, but can’t really explore it, and then never quite remember to come back for it later. (I love finding those Easter eggs in his books.)

We’re only a little over 100,000 years old as a distinct species. On a rock 4,500,000,000 years old in a backwater corner of the galaxy. Maybe we just missed out on someone, only a million years ago, before they came and went. Life has been around on this planet for a very long time, what would it have been like then, if someone else had evolved into the apex species other than humanity?

Perhaps those aliens left us a message out there, as McDevitt likes to explore. Or a building. Or, possibly, the great evil weapon/tool/technology thingee that eventually destroyed them. Think of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers, for one example.

That’s what I love about Science Fiction. I can think big thoughts, and then wrap whole story worlds around them. I have Alexandria Station. I have The Collective. I have at least two other universes I want to play in, with their own sets of rules and aliens. (I just need copious amounts of spare time with which to write. Day jobs suck, bubba.)

Because nobody knows. I can’t be wrong. I just have to have an entertaining story in an interesting place. And I get to play. Because only I get to know the truth.