::Excerpt at the end::
I’ve been writing a ton this November in the hopes of winning Nanowrimo. My SF WIP has been a new book called Sigil. I accidentally stumbled across the inspiration for it thanks to a small publishing company I looked up in connection with last year’s Imaginarium convention (yes, I know, rather circuitous.)
Anywho, I found the wiki for ‘jumpmaster’ open on my PC and I was really fascinated with the position. He’s the guy who trains the guys who jump out of airplanes. So, a really cool guy.
But I’m a SF writer, and there’s now a space force, so of course I’m going to put the guy in space. And of course the guy in space is going to have a different name. Spacejumper it is. The position ties in perfectly with my Hinterspace series because I always loved the fact that a major part of Ross’ initiatives are dependent on his jumping into atmo from orbit.
It’s been so much fun writing it so far. I love developing male characters and my hero for Sigil was no exception. He’s a stoic, nose to the grind stone, make no waves, and just be a bad ass at his job kind of guy. He’s survived more spacejumps than any other human alive (thanks to his being a trainer) and he has nerves of steel.
He’s very much the reluctant hero, and while I didn’t pattern card him after Bruce Willis, he definitely is along that vein of character.
What’s been an intriguing challenge is the way I decided to craft the story using a multi POV. I fell in love with the style after reading Blaine Pardoe’s By Land and by Sea series (highly recommend for a romping good time.) I have a handful of main characters and each of them move the story along, revealing different aspects as time goes on.
I used the style to some extent with Privateer, but Sigil will use it more.
For December, I’ll be working on editing an SF anthology for Quanta Publishing. You can look for that in early January. In February, I’m hoping to publish book 2 in the Hinterspace series, so you can look for that as well.
If you’re an aficionado of adventure space opera with a hard science veneer you’ll probably enjoy it. Pick up bk 1, Privateer, free on Kindle Unlimited, or purchase it for $.99.
SIGIL: Spacejumper 1
Cassie Heliope yawned and scrubbed her cheeks with her hands. She absentmindedly combed her fingers through her light brown hair, raking it into some semblance of order before she threw it up into a a hair tie.
She ordered a coffee to help keep her awake and hopped up to get it from the food replicator, carefully navigating furniture in the near silent room on her bionic legs. It was late at night and the sensor lab was almost empty. The wide banks of screens with their various star views gave the illusion of windows, but she knew better. Outside, their terraformed world with its artificial environment, was dark as night.
2300 hours eastern earth time. She tried to hold in another yawn as she found her seat again. Her hobby was starting to take its toll.
Really, she should quit. The tantalizing static of deep space signals had afforded humanity little, and though she hoped to be the first to pull order from the chaotic background noise of space, she knew it was as unlikely as discovering the fabled, though theoretically possible, gravity shoots between star systems. In other words, her odds were astronomically low.
That hadn’t prevented her from having an ongoing fascination with the signals, from getting a research position that allowed her to indulge her hobby, from diving into it with verve, like a welcome and comfortable respite, when yet another relationship resulted in failure. That tended to happen when one had no legs, no womb, and was just lucky to be able to pee like a normal human. Or that’s what she told herself.
She didn’t want to contemplate what it might mean otherwise. She knew she wasn’t a knockout. Knockouts got the sexy jobs that were front and center before the cameras. People like her, normal people with slightly too large noses, too wide mouths, and eyes that weren’t almond shaped got buried in research basements and windowless labs like this one.
Hinterspace intelligence analyst wasn’t the job she hoped to get when she’d gone to school, but she was happy to get the position after her accident had set her a good three years behind her peers. No one wanted a washed out cripple when there were fresh young minds with hale human legs who were willing to work for half the wage.
She had been working on a new theory about deep space static – her inspiration was Michelangelo. He had carved his marble pieces, so he said, by seeing the art inside the stone and chipping away everything that wasn’t the piece.
Of course, her problem was that she didn’t know what her ‘piece’ was supposed to look like. She wasn’t sure where to chip exactly, because what she was looking for was a process of trial and error. Over the years, rare though the discoveries had been, new system-changing information on the nature of space and the galaxy and the universe had been discovered through deep space signal research. It was enough to keep the flagging field alive. Enough to spark her interest, even if it wasn’t enough to pay her wages.
Her most recent spark of inspiration had her trying to look at deep space signals in a new way. Non-linear. Artistically, if one could imagine it. To look without looking. Or to see past the surface to what lay beneath. She had been working on writing a program that would combine all the various sensor data they received from the arrays that she quietly repurposed for her needs every night, and reset them before the start of the following day. It didn’t take much – simply redirecting the arrays away from toward the sun and the space that lay between them, and toward deep space.
Naturally, with such a limited array, she wasn’t able to get a robust sampling across the space that was visible to her, but it was enough for her purposes. Enough to test whether her program could work. All she needed was one, unexpected new piece of coherent information gleaned from an otherwise meaningless collection of signals to justify her entire life’s hobby.
She resumed work on the program, encoding the various parameters that would help it to see past the static. There was no way to tell what it would reveal; if it would reveal anything, but she had a hunch that something would give. Maybe that was just wishful thinking though.
She should go to bed, she thought, even as she sipped her coffee. One more test, she promised herself. Just one. She’d make this one last adjustment and then –
Her holo chirped with a notification.
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Love it!!