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Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Finlee Augare Books
Type: Fiction
Pages: 31
Copyright: 2014
ISBN-13: 9780991464333
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
The all-female Maiden’s Ark left Earth five years ago. A distress signal says Earth is lost, stranding lunar and asteroid colonists. Then someone sabotages the Ark’s vital fertility lab. While trying to solve the conspiracy, Security Chief Nina Rekovic must tread carefully between Returners she sympathizes with, the dictatorial captain who strips her of her duties, and an estranged lover who betrays her to the captain.
The Maiden’s Ark is an all-female spacecraft that left Earth five years earlier. A distress signal says Earth is lost, stranding lunar and asteroid colonists. Then someone sabotages the ship’s vital fertility lab. As chief of security, Nina must tread carefully between Returners with whom she sympathizes, the dictatorial captain who strips her of her duties, and an estranged lover who betrays her to the captain. Under constant surveillance, Nina digs into solving the conspiracy while she avoids being arrested or killed for digging too deep.
Excerpt
Nina Rekovic Private Log 2098-10-17/8:06 AM
Another security sweep and another boring diversion from my Chief Engineer duties. In the five years since we left Earth’s orbit, it’s been mostly crimes of boredom: squabbles over limited space and who-did-what-to-or-with-whom.
In the orange com-room I find my sweetie, Chief Communications Officer Carmen Blythe. Her lithe, muscular form jerks to attention when I enter. She’s been dozing again: end of shift.
I push aside her brown curls and massage her knotted shoulders. She leans forward to give me room to loosen the muscles across her well-toned back. Being on opposing shifts, I rarely see her, like ghosts passing at twilight. Her shift ends as mine begins. At least I can time my security sweeps to catch her before she gets off. She rises; gives me a welcome hug and a lingering kiss: implied promises for the weekend.
Lucky me, at least I get to move on my rounds. Carmen has to sit and listen to intermittent Earth-coms that now take a year to reach us. The rarely used QE-com light flashes and squawks static that could wake the dead.
Carmen pulls away. “Got-to-go.” She looks like she’s been studying all night for com finals and needs an adrenaline boost.
I should get on with my rounds, but I linger. It feels good to hang with Carmen and watch her work. She’s the reason I signed onto the Maiden’s Ark after my dad’s prolonged brain cancer got the better of him. He refused advanced treatments; he didn’t want to artificially prolong his life.
Quantum-Entanglement-coms are unusual. To provide their limited instantaneous communications, Captain Belova McDaniels—I call her Beluga because of her size—installed two QE containment units. The first entangles with a sister unit in Colorado Springs; the other on the miss-named ‘dark’ side of the moon, the side facing away from Earth.
Carmen runs the QE signal through filters to verify consistency and reconstruct the message from the few bits of transmitted data. This much I’ve gathered from scattered weekend conversations over drinks. She has to tease out the message before its delicate quantum bits are lost.
I tremble with excitement. The last QE-com two years ago announced election results: Neanderthals won. Actually, real Neanderthals would have been an improvement. The election only reinforced Captain McDaniel’s rationale for leaving the Earth behind and starting a new life.
Of course it took over seven months for the regular Earth-com details to arrive. The Radical Patriot’s Party had won by promising to gut the space budget as they took a machete to all “non-essential” government programs.
Three words scroll across Carmen’s screen:
Earth lost asteroid.
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