Post #262 June 28 2021 “Plague is Done; Get Ready for Diaspora!” In the last few days, I have completely finished my latest book in The Farpool Stories. It’s called The Farpool: Plague. I plan to upload this new title on 2 July 2021. Look for it in the days to follow, at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. The next title in The Farpool Stories is called The Farpool: Diaspora. Almost all prep work is done and I expect to begin writing the first draft on or about 9 August 2021. With luck, this title will be done and ready to upload by the end of 2021 or early into 2022. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Aboard Europa Clipper Jupiter Orbit Insertion January 5, 2210 (Earth U.T.) Three days and a handful of hours after arriving in Jupiter orbit through the Atlantic Farpool, Europa Clipper had put in at Gateway Station for some light maintenance work and re-provisioning. Alicia Wu and Evgeni Kotlas were sitting at a table in the ship’s crew’s mess, nursing a few beers. Kotlas fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Wu said. “With hair—“ Kotlas pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.” “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for Farpool school.” It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles. “Ten seconds to separation,” Sonora called. The captain scanned her boards and instruments, pronounced herself satisfied with what she saw. Europa Clipper was docked at the forward nose port of Gateway Station, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Alicia Wu had termed it. “Three…two…one…separating now—“ There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Sonora pulsed Clipper’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the Station. Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Clipper backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three-and-a-half-day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation. Miriam Sonora was glad Clipper and Gateway both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago. For several days after departing Gateway, Europa Clipper coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Sonora passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Clipper dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor. After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Wu and the rest of the crew that came by the crew’s mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. Wu found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes. In time, Clipper made her way into orbit about Europa. Clipper’s pilot, Reynaldo Diaz, joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them. “Gives me the creeps,” Casey Winans said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink. “All those cracks are seams in the ice plates,” Belket klu kel: Om’t marveled. “And to think that’s where we’re going, right into one of those seams.” “And below—“ added Sonora. She decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. “All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last-minute details before we head down.” The briefing lasted half an hour…. Okay, so that’s the excerpt. I hope you’ll like the final result and I hope the excerpt whets your appetite to learn more about the world of The Farpool Stories. My final title in this series, after Plague and Diaspora, will be called The Farpool: Destiny (likely available sometime in the middle of 2022). That will make a total of eight stories in the overall arc. That’s enough for me. The Word Shed will take a brief hiatus for a mid-summer vacation next week. There won’t be a post for July 5, due to the holiday. The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 12, 2021. See you then and have a great holiday. Phil B.