Post #120 April 23, 2018

“Downloads and Excerpts”

As promised, I am showing below the latest updates on all my downloads through Smashwords.  I’ve organized the data by book series (as of 4-16-18).

Tales of the Quantum Corps = 4998

The Farpool Stories = 1461

Nanotroopers = 6473

All Others = 1204

Of special interest to me is the following statistic: since I uploaded my last ebook (The Farpool: Exodus) on 2-2-18, all titles have enjoyed a cumulative increase in downloads of 1088.  Somebody out there is downloading and presumably reading my stuff, for which I am grateful.  Now, just a few more reviews would be nice…

My next book uploaded will be a horror story entitled The Specter.  Look for it at the Smashwords store or at other fine ebook retailers by the end of May, 2018.  My next science fiction novel is entitled The Farpool: Convergence.  It should be available in June or July 2018.

Both books will be free.  Check ‘em out.

To prime the pump for downloads a little more, I’ve included below another excerpt from The Farpool: Convergence….

 

The Farpool finally spit jumpship Majoris out right into a shallow, steaming lake beneath a blood red sky, a sky thick with the sulfurous fumes and fat rain drops drumming on the hull.  After the vibrations subsided, Chase checked with the PSO, Alicia Yang.

“How close to our target coordinates, Alicia?”

Yang studied her board and its plots and displays.  “Best I can make out, we’re within a few decades of the temporal focus, based on your maneuvers and our physical landing point is here—” she pointed to a map.  “Southeastern edge of this big continent, about six hundred forty kilometers from the equator.  Majoris will auto-confirm once she takes sky sightings.”  Yang peered out the porthole at the steam and fog enveloping the ship.  “If she can even take sightings in this crap.”

Chase studied his own map display.  “It’s called Pangaea, according to this.  Supercontinent.  All the Earth’s land masses have come together like a big puzzle into this one continent.  Let’s get outside and see if we can detect any Coethi presence.”  Chase then got on the ship’s 1MC and said, “Okay, troops…let’s consider this an opposed-entry visit.  Get all your gear together, arm weapons and button up.  We leave the ship in ten minutes.”

Navigator Marco Kumar watched the bright red-yellow tongues of lava flowing down the slopes of a distant mountain.  “Ours not to reason why….”

Majoris’ lockout was cycled and the Genesis 3 team exited, two at a time.  First order of business was to set up some kind of defensible perimeter around the ship, out to a distance of several hundred meters.  This was done by Tulandra klu, the Ponkti amphib, serving as their Containment Systems tech. 

Tulandra plopped down into the shallow lake they had landed in and was immediately brushed by a large lizard-like creature undulating its way across the surface.  “Cyclops says it’s a tetrapod, probably Hylonomus.”  She adjusted her headgear slightly to get more annotation in her eyepiece.  “Sauropsid reptile…can move at high speed land or water.”

Win Blakey had a somewhat jaundiced view of all amphibs.  “Tu, that’s just one of your older sisters.  Say hello.”

The rest of the team followed Tulandra across the shallow lake, sloshing their way up a low bank to drier ground.  The Ponkti extracted a small capsule from her web belt and thumbed its control stud on top.  Instantly, a fine mist issued from the capsule, flickering slightly over their heads.  Tulandra waved it about her head in a circle.

“Launching ANAD sensorbots now,” she announced. 

The mist dispersed and vanished from view.  But now, Genesis 3 had eyes and ears to probe their surroundings and warn them of approaching danger.

Dr, Macalvey splashed up onto the bank and made a face.  “Ugh.  Like a Scottish bog, only hotter.”  He took a few deep breaths, did some deep-knee bends.  “Oxygen content is higher here.”

Yang concurred, ‘sniffing’ the air with a probe she extracted from her web belt.  “Reading O2 levels now at thirty-five percent…that is higher than what we’re used to.  Earth normal in our time stream is about twenty-two.”

“Must be why my throat’s so dry,” Chase decided. 

“Wow,” muttered Kumar, grabbing a small rotted stump for balance.  “Check out the wind gusts.”

“That one was over forty kph,” said Tulandra.  “The Earth was rotating faster in this time stream.  Cyclops is saying the sidereal day is about twenty-two hours versus twenty-four.”

“That explains the wind,” Chase decided.

“And the high oxygen levels explain all these fires,” Macalvey added.  “Feels like we’re inside an oven.”

All around the lake, the rolling terrain was host to dozens of fires, spiraling wind-blown ashes into a thick blanket that coated everything.  Mountains ringed the lake and their landing zone.  Raucous screeches caught their attention and all eyes turned skyward.

A V-shaped formation of long-winged creatures soared out of the ash and fog, swooping down on them, pulling up from their dive at the last moment.  Yang aimed her own head-mounted Cyclops at their tails and wings as they disappeared into the fog again.  Seconds later, annotated text scrolled on her eyepiece.

“Meganeura—“she read off.  “Believe it or not, those were giant dragonflies.  Eighty- centimeter wing spans.  Ugh—”

Macalvey muttered, “Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood.  Edinburgh this is not.”

Chase said, “Win, you got anything yet?”

The QT1 checked the displays on his own Cyclops.  “There’s something just tickling the sensorbots…can’t quite grab it yet.  Tu, can you run your bots a little higher?  I pinched off ten percent of your swarm…give me twenty percent.  That should make resolution better.  Go higher and spread out.”

Alicia Yang was grim.  “Any kind of decoherence wake around here should be cause for suspicion.  I can’t imagine anything quantum occurring naturally in this hellhole during the late Carboniferous Period.”

Kumar and Macalvey went with Angie Gilliam to a small hillock nearby for a better view.  Angie was sweating profusely in the hot, humid air and had to rest against a nearby stump, which promptly shuddered, growled and moved off on four legs, startling everyone.  The tetrapod headed for a nearby pool and plopped in. 

Kumar checked his Cyclops.  “Looks like you disturbed a Labyrinthodontia.  It says here they can grow to five or six meters.”

Angie made a face.  “I’ve seen gators in creeks around Scotland Beach smaller than that.  How long do we have to stay here?”

Just then, Win Blakely uttered a sharp cry.  “Got ‘em!  Bingo!  Big deco wake disturbance…something out there is really snapping spacetime, just like a wet rag.”

“Heading and range?” Chase asked.

Blakely walked around like a blind man in a drunken fog as he adjusted his Cyclops for the feed from the bots overhead.  “I make the heading that way—“he pointed into the sun, to the northwest.  “Best heading is three two five degrees.  Locus is at least six hundred klicks from here, diffuse but strong.  Really strong.”

“Got to be artificial,” Yang decided.

“Okay,” Chase waved everybody to come back.  “Re-board the ship.  We’ll have to make a short flight along Win’s vector.  Grab all your gear.”  He stepped carefully into the shallow lake and sloshed his way to the hatch.  “And watch where you step.  Everything around here is alive.”

One by one, the Genesis 3 crew climbed back into Majoris and the hatch was sealed.  Moments later, the jumpship lifted away from its watery landing spot and rose into the fog-shrouded sky.  Chase put them on Win’s heading and the ship lurched forward, gaining altitude. 

“Half propulsor,” Chase told Yang.  “I don’t want to fly past the target.  Win, give me a count when we’re close.”

“Copy that, Skipper.”

Majoris cruised along at several thousand meters until the land below began to shift, from a plain dotted with smoking mountains and steaming lakes and fire columns and fumaroles to a sandy shelf and then a broad blue-green sea, extending to the horizon in all directions.

“Paleo-Tethys Sea, the map says,” Yang observed, occasionally taking a peek out her side window.  “We must have originally landed on the edge of a place called Gondwana.  This ocean will eventually become part of the Atlantic.  Pangaea is rifting apart now.”

Tulandra was intrigued.  “Just think, three hundred million years from now, a big waterspout called the Farpool will put twenty-thousand refugees from Seome down there somewhere.”

“Land up ahead,” Chase announced.  He studied the terrain through the clouds below them.  “Looks like jungle too.  This should be fun.”

“Start descending, Skipper.  Target locus is less than a hundred kilometers, dead ahead.”

Chase manipulated Majoris’ speed and altitude to bring the jumpship to a dead hover over the edge of a vast swamp.  “Tell me the target’s not down there, in that swamp.”

Blakely shook his head.  “Sorry, Skipper.  Main source is just ahead, along that shoreline.  Below those big trees.”

Angie had started wearing a Cyclops herself.  She read off the annotation on her eyepiece.  “You mean the Lepidostrobus?  It says they can grow thirty meters high and two meters in diameter.”

“That’s the one,” Blakely said.

Chase took a deep breath.  “If I can squeeze us through the branches…I’ll put the ship down on that far shoreline.  I’m not too keen on landing in the swamp itself.  I just hope the ground is firm enough.”

Down they went.

They came through a low hanging steam bank to the very edge of the swamp.  Majoris settled down to a rattling landing and was still.  Overhead, lightning veined in sharp bursts across purple and rose-colored clouds, thick and steaming overhead.  The ground trembled and through the trees, they could see the red glow of another volcano, simmering and smoking.  It seemed about to blow.

The swamp was extensive, filled with moss-covered trees, low-hanging branches and mossy patches on rocks surrounding the edge of the water.  Cypress knees looked vaguely menacing in the twilight.  A faint mist hovered over the water’s surface. 

Nothing moved.  No screeches, no howler monkeys.  No birds cawing in the air.  Steam and smoke and shuddering ground were all that gave movement to the swamp.

“Looks like the Everglades,” said Angie.

“Right.  Let’s get to work. Win, it’s your show.”

They scouted along the swamp banks for a few minutes.  It was a vast wetland, thick with ropy vine and large, lobe and ear-shaped leaves, damp with moisture and humidity, hanging nearly to the soft spongy ground.  The Genesis 3 crew picked their way carefully through leaf piles and clinging vine, occasionally hacking and whacking their way through heavy underbrush, wary of slithering things underfoot, but they found none.  Nothing living at all, not even flies or mosquitoes.  Still, Angie nearly turned an ankle in a small sinkhole nearly hidden between two tree trunks.

Finally, Macalvey begged for a halt.  They stood over a narrow bubbling, foaming inlet, clearly the water was flowing somewhere from here.  The Scottish virologist rubbed his ankle for a moment, wincing in pain.  “I think it’ll be all right.”

Blakely probed for more decoherence wakes, the tell-tale signature of quantum entanglement. 

“Not far,” he announced.  “Maybe three hundred meters around the shoreline.”

Chase had already primed his own HERF rifle.  “Set weapons to level one.  Tulandra, do we have eyes and ears?”

“ANAD away,” she announced.  The mist of the botswarm was soon lost in the steam and humid air, its flickers and light pops vanishing overhead in the low-hanging limbs and branches.

The ground rumbled and all of them looked through the trees.  There were tall mountains in the distance.  The summit of the nearest one glowed orange-red in the cathedral gloom of the forest.

“Looks like we might have a blow soon,” Yang said.  “I don’t like the looks of that one.  Could that glow be part of our target…Coethi at work?”

“Could be,” Chase said.  “My question is: how do we get the hell out of here if we have to?”

“If we’re actually here,” Kumar muttered.  “Wherever here is.”

“Hey, what’s that?”

At the same time, they all spied a fog bank roiling across the top of the swamp.  Tendrils of steam drifted in patches.

“What’s what?”

“That.”

Now, the fog bank had taken on a more menacing look.  As they looked more closely, they could see small flashes and pops of light within the fog, as if it were thick with fireflies.

“Those aren’t fireflies, Skipper.”

The hairs on the back of Chase’s neck stood up.  “And that’s not fog either.  Unless I’m seeing things, that a swarm of some kind.”

“Yeah and it’s coming our way.”

Blakely’s eyes almost popped out of his head.  “Uh, folks…massive deco wakes there…massive signal…dead ahead, closing on our position.”

Helping Angie and Macalvey stumble through stagnant pools and thick underbrush, they moved sideways along the bank of the swamp but the swarm swelled and soon blocked their way.  Chase figured they would just backtrack the way they had come but the swarm filled in behind them and they soon found themselves trapped on a narrow spit of dry land, surrounded by cypress knees and piles of moss-covered rocks.

Though the swarm had nearly enveloped them, at least it hadn’t closed any further.

“Look!’ Tulandra pointed at several patches of swarm, now dropping down closer to the ground.  As they watched, the light flickering inside changed pattern, becoming more intense, pulsing faster, almost like a strobe and the fingers of the swarm swept right across the moss covering on top of the rocks, pausing momentarily at each moss patch.

“Fantastic,” Macalvey breathed.  “It’s writing genetic code, Chase, right into the cells of that moss.  Injecting something directly into the cells.”

“Maybe this is how life got started,” Angie said. 

“No,” said Macalvey, adjusting his own Cyclops.  “This is where life got changed.”

“The Coethi,” said Chase.  A cold chill ran down his back.

Then, Yang spotted something.  “Look…look there, though the fog.  That sandbar—”

Startled, Chase squinted to see better.  It was clear they had unexpected visitors.  All along the sandbar, shapes and figures like wraiths moved silently, stooping and bending down to collect something, bagging their prizes, then moving further along the sandbar. 

It was Tulandra who first recognized one of them.  “He’s Ponkti,” she cried out.  “In a mobilitor… I’d know that hoarse breathing anywhere.”

Yang had already recognized two others.  “And Chinese…with them.  There--!” she pointed to some human figures among the group.  “Those two are Chinese!”

Chase had a growing suspicion that his Genesis 3 teammates were right.

Somehow, in some way he hadn’t yet figured out, a small team of Ponkti and Chinese explorers had come through the Farpool to the same time and place as Majoris.   Now they seemed to be assisting the swarm of Coethi in some unknown task, perhaps making an alliance with the Bugs, perhaps trying to learn the secrets of their technology.

The mission of Genesis 3 had suddenly become much more complicated.  

 

That’s the excerpt.  I hope it intrigues you.  Look for the full story early this summer. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 30.  See you then.

Phil B.