Post #163 April 1 2019

“Time Jumpers: Halfway Through…”

As of this writing, I find myself having completed five of the twelve planned episodes of my serial Time Jumpers.  Episodes 1 and 2 have been uploaded and have 200 downloads between them.  There has been one review that I know of…unfortunately, the reviewer didn’t particularly care for Episode 1, but that’s a writer’s life.

I am three episodes ahead of my upload schedule which is a good feeling.  As I will be taking a lengthy overseas trip in early June, I want to be done and have archived Episode 6 before I leave.  When I come back, I then will have six weeks to do the next episode, a process that is currently taking me about three weeks.  That’s how you do serial stories to a schedule: get ahead and stay ahead.

I have been quite liberal in veering off from my previously developed outlines in order to explore various characters and follow the dictates of the story flow.  Therein lies one of the challenges of a serialized story.  Each episode should stand alone as a story yet they are all clearly connected and I have often left episodes with a big, bold TO BE CONTINUED, at the end, to attract readers to the next episode.  With each uploaded episode, the story flow is more and more constrained by what has gone before.  This is both a challenge and an opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

With all that, I have included below an excerpt from an upcoming episode.  Enjoy…

 

Monthan Dringoth was sobered by the damage the Twister had done when 1^st TD had aimed it down into the Hollows of Gibbons’ Grotto.  When he and Nathan Golich entered The Lucky Dinar deep in the Tenderloin district of Gibbstown and ordered a round of cold ones from the auto-bar, they were also deep in discussion about how Time Guard would respond to such a pyrrhic victory at Sturdivant.  Sure, the Coethi had been driven off, for the time being, but at what cost?

M’Bela and Yang were there, too, along with Acth:On’e.  Only URME remained at the ship, still running down stubborn glitches in Cygnus’ collapser circuitry. 

Dringoth was buying.

Golich slurped some frost around the top of his mug.  Dringoth pressed a thumb into the servbot’s head slot to pay off the round.

“You were lucky,” Golich announced.  “Nobody’s ever done that before…gone through Time’s Peak.  What was it like?”

Yang closed her eyes, sipping at her own drink, twirling the little parasol between her fingers.  “Like being swept up in one of K-World’s sandstorms inside a barrel.  You can’t see anything.  You’re getting bounced and battered around—”

Dringoth added, “We were both pretty much knocked out.  I opened my eyes once and nearly vomited.  It was like watching a million vids at super high speed…none of your senses can make anything out of what’s happening.”

“And you still wound up in T-4487…what are the odds of that?”

“It wasn’t the same worldline,” Yang corrected him. 

“Yeah,” Dringoth said, watching the door as another jumpship crew came in, arguing and laughing out loud.  “Where we wound up, I had died and we lost the Battle of Gibbons’ Grotto.  K-World was a wasteland.  Had a hell of a time convincing our rescuers who we were.”

“Scorpio,” said Acth:On’e.  His lips were covered with beer frost, which he licked with his tongue. 

“She was on sector patrol along that worldline, picket duty outside the Peak.  Captain was a gruff fellow named Valesquez…real Time Guard boy scout, that one.  Everything by the book. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the Academy.  Once we managed to establish our bona fides, it was nothing but investigations and bureaucracy and brass covering their asses from then on.  Once she got permission to jump back to T-001, I was never so glad to get home in my whole life.”

“Me, too,” Yang admitted.  “Never thought of K-World as paradise until after I went barrel-rolling through Time’s Peak.”

The talk stopped when a third jumpship crew swaggered into the Dinar, most of them hammered into slobbering, stumbling semi-comatose jellybags.  The din briefly subsided across the bar as Capricorn’s crew and Gemini’s crew encountered each other along the edge of the bar. Then a jumper from the ‘Corn saw Dringoth and Golich and blinked his watery eyes in disbelief.

“Well, I’ll be a Telitorian birdsnake…that’s looks like a bunch of pukes from Cygnus over there.  Hey, Velho, check out that bunch of Cygnoids…” he spat a wad of something blue, probably chewed khat…the leaf was everywhere in the Tenderloin, “can’t say I ever laid eyes on a sorrier bunch of jumpers than them—”

Golich stiffened and was about to rise to face this troglodyte, but Dringoth laid a firm hand on his elbow.

“Not now, Commander.  Take it easy.  Cornies are just blowing off steam.”

“But, Captain, I—”

“Save it for a better time.  They’re not the enemy.  We’re all on the same team here.”

Dringoth had hoped the Capricorn and Gemini jumpers would cancel each other out, focus on boasting and cursing and insulting each other and leave the rest of them alone.  But when a Gemini crewman sauntered over, sloshing his drink on half the patrons as he came up, Dringoth knew that was a forlorn hope.

The time jumper from Gemini was short, but stocky, a bull of a man with a thick ropy neck and slurred, heavily accented words.  His jump suit had a name patch that read something like Kizim somethingorother.  He was grinning like a skeleton’s rictus and his bald head shone from the overhead lights.

“Cyg…nus…eh?” he got out thickly.  His drink sloshed on Golich’s shoulder.  The commander bit his lip, sucked in a breath and tried to ignore the intruder.  “Heard she was being re-routed.”

“Oh,” muttered Acth:On’e, over the top of his mug.  “How’s that?”

Kizim laughed and drooled at the same time.  “You din’t hear…Guard reassigned that old garbage scow to escort duty…other side of Landfall.  Escorting other buckets right to the scrapyard.”

“Oh,” said Golich, his shoulders tightening for what he knew was bound to come.  “Where’d you hear that piece of crap?”

Kizim’s face scrunched up into a mixture of pain and laughter.  “Ever’body knows it.  Cygnus ain’t nothin’ but a bucket of rivets flying in loose formation.  Couldn’t even aim that Twister thing right, blew off half of Gibbons, I heard.  Go see for yourself, Goldilocks.”

Golich stood up abruptly, knocking over his half-empty mug.  “And I suppose Gemini’s the marvel of the universe…you know, pal—”  Golich leaned close to Kizim’s face, right into a miasma of khat breath and bleary eyes—“…you know what they say about Gemini?”

“Eh?  No…what’s that?”

Golich chuckled a low guttural chuckle.  “I hear that old scum dredger’s nothing but the bastard offspring of an infernal liaison…two diseased arachtyls from K-World, both covered with canker sores, got to humping it and spat out a smoking pile of crap with a vague resemblance to a jumpship.  Guard was so impressed, they stuck a name on it and commissioned it into the fleet…Gemini…the Twins, get it, stinko?”

Kizim blinked hard.  The swing, when it came was off the mark but managed to clip Golich on the ear.  And then, like the proverbial butterfly who flapped its wings and created a hurricane, the brawl was on.

Dringoth never really knew who threw the first punch.  But before he could even get to his feet, the entire front bar of the Lucky Dinar was a maelstrom of flying fists and falling bodies and chairs crashing and tables collapsing and bots beeping and glass shattering and beer everywhere.

Kizim and Golich were in a wrestling match in no time, first on top of the table, then on the floor, rolling in khat leaf and butts and ashes and slick patches of drink spill.  Golich was taller and rangier, but Kizim was stronger, a bull fighting a giraffe, Evelyn M’Bela would later describe it.

Golich landed a few solid punches, but Kizim seemed impervious to everything and just butted like a bull, again and again, right into the commander’s chest, knocking the wind out of him every time.

Acth:On’e rose to come to his crewmate’s defense but soon found himself enveloped in the arms of another Cornie, trying to strangle him from behind.  M’Bela landed a side kick right in the privates of a third Cornie and Alicia Yang was soon crouched herself on top of nearby table, hands in strike position, slashing and chopping at anyone who came near.

Dringoth took a few shoves from hands unseen, shoved back and burrowed his way to the bar, where he hand-motioned the auto-bar for another round of Lick and slurped it carefully, even sitting up on the bar, lifting his legs, when more bodies came crashing by.

It took Time Guard police half an hour to get everything calmed down.

 

So that’s the excerpt.  Let me know what you think.  The next episode to be uploaded, Episode 3, appears on April 15.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 8.  See you then.

 

Phil B.