I was sure I parked the shuttle right here.
My fake book review, based solely on its cover.
Ryan was beginning to suspect that he’d been had. After seventeen hours floating alone in an envirosuit, listening to the same song over and over again, that was definitely looking likely.
Reflecting on the sequence of events, he wondered if there had been any warning signs. The ad on Craigslist seemed pretty straightforward. There was nothing strange with the seller wanting to dock in a parking orbit around this uninhabited planet, right? It was the same galaxy, so that counted as dealing locally, right?
It was only polite to accept when the seller insisted on coming aboard Ryan’s ship, too, instead of just meeting in the airlock, right? Ryan supposed the part about the seller insisting that Ryan put on the envirosuit was a bit odd. After all, he was just trying to buy last year’s generation iPad for near full-retail value.
The stranger didn’t seem the slightest bit untrustworthy when he politely, but insistently, coaxed Ryan into the secondary airlock. Ryan was even a little bit surprised when the stranger sealed the airlock and then blew Ryan out into open space.
Ryan desperately wished he’d thought to program the envirosuit’s media selection with more than just one song. Of course, he had thought to bring the hardware key for the self-destruct mechanism with him. The mechanism Ryan had set to blow his recently stolen spacecraft to bits in about three more hours unless the key was replaced.
Ryan might not have been the fastest particle in the hadron collider, but he wasn’t stupid.
Except for the part about not figuring out how to catch a lift back to inhabited space before his air ran out in another fifteen minutes. Maybe someone with an improbability drive would be along shortly.
# # #
Okay, so that’s not what this collection of stories is really about. Here’s some of the actual description:
After the end of the Quiet War, the victorious forces from Earth have taken control of the cities and settlements of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. In ‘Making History’ and ‘Karyl’s War’, the victors and the defeated discover that defining the end of the war isn’t easy. In ‘Incomers’, a young visitor from Earth learns of an unexpected reconciliation. In ‘Second Skin’, a spy attempting to kidnap a valuable gene wizard discovers that he isn’t quite what he thought he was. And in ‘Reef’, the discovery of a fast-evolving ecosystem of vacuum organisms in a planetoid in the Kuiper Belt has far-reaching implications for the spread of life throughout the Solar System.
You can find more details over at Amazon. Go check it out for yourself.
