Let’s get something clear right from the start. This thing they call Artificial Intelligence, currently being discussed and promoted in a big way? It’s a misapplication of the term. These systems are not conscious entities, certainly not in the HAL 9000 or SkyNet science fictional sense. To the best of my understanding these are machine learning algorithms, designed to respond to requests in ways that mimic human interactions. They search the vast online resources out there, do so in an astonishingly short amount of time, and come up with a response that meets the criteria set by the user. That response is given in a way that reads (or sounds) like something almost human. AI systems get better at this the more often they’re used, and in that sense, at least, they do learn.
They respond according to their programming which, to be honest, is almost mind-boggling in its sophistication and ability. But Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term that has been appropriated by those who see “gold in them thar hills.” It serves them well as a marketing buzzword. These systems are not intelligent in the sense of being capable of independent thought, which would make it possible for them to be creative. (Not yet, anyway.) They don’t think. They don’t create. They harvest, organize, and present information in what seems a personable manner. They are computer tools to be used – or misused.
And misused they will be. Nothing special about AI as far as this goes. It’s a short list that contains only technologies that have never lent themselves to abuse. It always comes around to whether or not the risks inherent in deliberate misuse of technology outweigh the benefits. With AI this remains to be seen, although there certainly are signs of trouble ahead. One example, relevant to what I do, is the application of so-called AI to the world of writing.
While I believe that a time will come when true AI “wakes up” and develops its own sort of awareness and creativity, I don’t see it happening in the immediate future. The idea that a machine of any sort will be able to do what I do, and do it well enough to compete effectively with flesh-and-blood writers, while not entirely far-fetched, doesn’t worry me. These systems, when asked to start a story or write an essay, sift the virtual world and cobble together things found out there to fit the request. They create nothing new in the process. I don’t see the novelist or short story writer being replaced any time soon by such systems.
What I do see happening, with ever increasing frequency, is the use of so-called AI to “aid” the writing process. I’ve heard of writers who, for various reasons, have turned to these augmented search engines for story ideas, opening paragraphs (and even chapters), and for evaluation of stylistic elements in their writing. All of this is done to make the process easier or more efficient, or to save money by eliminating editorial expenses. Such use is frequently described as being on par with the employment of grammar programs. Some of those experimenting with AI seem to be looking for a way to jump-start a writing career that has faltered, for whom motivation has been undermined by a lack of success as defined by book sales. Such a measure of success is an expectation too many aspiring writers carry into their effort right from the beginning. Lack of fulfillment of this expectation is understandably frustrating, and that frustration can suppress the motivation to write.
For some, this use of AI might turn out to be just what they need to regain their motivation and start writing again. Having your personal well of inspiration cease to generate story ideas must be a horrible feeling. If AI helps someone to bounce back from such a dry spell, it could be considered an example of proper use of the technology, and it would be hard to hold that use against them. But to my mind, the current application of AI to get the actual work of writing done amounts to a steep and slippery slope. For no matter what “tools” you employ to make writing seem easier, the problem of finding and cultivating readers will not change. And it is this problem, more than anything else, that interferes with commercial success. Finding an “easier” way to write fiction will surely create a temptation in some to let the machine do ever more of the writer’s work, possibly increasing their productivity, but with a decline in quality. This is already happening; as a result, a few short fiction and poetry periodicals are now closed to unsolicited work because they are being inundated by lackluster, machine-generated material. If this trend continues, the independent book-publishing world risks being swamped as well, as increasing numbers of frustrated writers release books they have “written” using AI. Books that are, to an ever-increasing degree, the work of machine learning systems that become more adept at imitating human expression with each iteration – books with stories lacking the spark of true creativity that gives good fiction its emotional power.
Even if human readers of fiction recognize the soullessness of such material, there’s nothing to stop it from being published and promoted. The market is already seriously over-saturated as it is, and piling more – possibly substandard – books into the mix will help no one, writers or readers. This, more than the possibility that a machine might replace me, gives me nightmares.
For my own part, I won’t be using these so-called AI tools in my writing. This isn’t a purely ethical decision on my part. I won’t be tempted to try the AI writing tricks I see ever more people embracing because I don’t find them useful. Coming up with ideas or story starts? Seriously, I’ll die of old age before I run out of story ideas. As for reducing the “grunt work” involved with writing (whatever it is people really mean by the phrase), I enjoy the actual process of writing too much for that to have any appeal. And I don’t believe for a moment that AI can edit a book for me as effectively as a human being. So, when you read a story or a book by me (or even a weblog essay), you can be assured it was produced by 100% organic methods.
I was once told, by a reader, that she was not going to read any further into the War of the Second Iteration series because the second book – Founders’ Effect– had ended in a cliffhanger. She loathed cliffhangers, considering them a cheap way to insure that readers went on to the next book. Instead of seeming defensive of my writing style, I observed that she must not be a fan of Tolkien. This comment produced a puzzled frown. The Lord of the Rings, as it happened, was one of her favorite works. And so I reminded her of the last line of The Two Towers: “Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy.” A valiant effort was then made by the reader to tweak the definition of “cliffhanger” to exclude its use by Tolkien. The effort was abandoned when the ending of the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back came into the conversation. (A third party in the discussion pointed to similarities between the ending of my book and that film.)
To be sure, there are cliffhangers and there are cliffhangers. Like any technique applied to writing fiction (and here I am speaking of the creation of a multibook series) cliffhangers can be use well or badly. A good cliffhanger actually ends a story, providing closure for that portion of the story arc of the series. The characters are in a bad spot, but you close the book (or watch the credits roll) with at least some clue as to where things are going. You know Samwise is going to go after Frodo, and that Han Solo’s friends will not abandon him. This is exactly what I was trying to do at the end of Founders’ Effect. Apparently most readers have found my use of a cliffhanger in that book acceptable. According to the sales of the remainder of the series, better than 90% of the people who read Founders’ Effect go on to read the next three books.
I find that cliffhangers, like adverbs and adjectives, are best used sparingly, but not necessarily avoided entirely. As a reader, I’m not usually troubled by them. If the writer displayed enough skill to keep my attention all the way to the last page of the book, a cliffhanger at the end will more than likely have been handled properly. (The story has ended – but wait! There’s more! And I want more.) If the writer isn’t sufficiently skilled at this art to hold me all the way through a book – well, in that case, how the story ends would be a moot point. Very rarely, I find myself at the end of a book in a series that feels as if an arbitrary page limit had been reached. Something bad happens, the heroes are imperiled, and it just dangles there. I find that annoying as a reader, and I’m aware that it happens often enough to give the concept of a cliffhanger a bad reputation.
As a writer, aware of how badly readers might react to a clunky cliffhanger ending, few techniques I use cause me as much second-guessing. Does this segment of the overall series story arc really end here, in this deep pit of adversity currently occupied by the characters? Or would the larger story be better served by a resolution here, in this volume, that sets up the next book? In other words, does ending the book at this point, with the protagonist tied to the proverbial railroad tracks, actually make sense? In approaching such a decision, I’m usually going more on gut feelings than some sort of nuts-and-bolts analysis. A story has a way of evolving what I like to call an internal logic, a pattern that could also be called an emergent property. That logic or property can soon direct the story in ways that make sense – and should be followed – even when the writer started out with some other idea in mind. In my case, when it came time to end Founders’ Effect, the way that book had evolved, and what it suggested about the next book in the series, made a cliffhanger the most logical way to end it and set up The Plight of the Eli’ahtna.
If the cliffhanger feels right, thought must of course then be given to picking up the next installment in a way that repays the reader for their trust. That’s not always a simple thing to pull off, and this might explain why some cliffhangers misfire – and why I don’t often employ such endings in my books. I clearly did so in Founders’ Effect, and to a lesser degree in The Courage to Accept– and so far, those two books are my only examples. After all, it’s quite possible to leave a reader with the knowledge that there’s more to come, without leaving a character dangling from the edge of a cliff by their fingernails.
That being so, why use one at all? To my way of thinking, used properly – and sparingly – cliffhangers can be an effective way to increase the tension within a multi-book series, keeping the reader engaged in a way that avoids the dreaded middle-book syndrome. Cliffhangers raise the stakes, so to speak, and done well keep the flow of the story strong enough that the reader remains motivated. It really can work that way. The thought of Frodo in the hands of the orcs took me straight to The Return of the King. And guess where I was the day after they released Return of the Jedi? Yes, like so many of you, in line at a theater, eager to see that cliffhanger resolved.
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I was often criticized, as a youngster, for my reading habits. This was especially true when I was in my early to mid-teens. The truth is, outside of assigned reading for classes, about all I read was escapist fiction, science fiction in particular. I read some nonfiction on my own, of course, on matters to do with natural history and astronomy, but when you think about it, those interests – which were anything but mainstream in my small home town – were a sort of escape in their way. But when it came to reading fiction, science fiction (available fantasy having been limited to Tolkien’s work at that time) was literally all I read. And reread – books of my own being hard to come by, lacking any real income of my own. The town library was hardly well endowed with such fiction, and one of the librarians was among those who expressed “concerns” over my steady diet of escapism.
Pick a dearly held habit by any teenager, and a rationalization for it will be supplied – by that teenager. Or by the person that teenager grew up to be. It won’t always be simply self-serving, much less flat-out wrong. I had mine, being in general a misfit. Those less-than-mainstream interests cited above were shared by very few of my classmates (in the case of astronomy, by none at all), and in a small, conservative town, my corresponding lack of interest in sports and automobiles was viewed with suspicion. The things that interested me set me apart. Lacking much of a social life, as a result, I read books. The stories offered an escape from the often painful awkwardness of not fitting in, and at first, that was all that I needed. But they also fired my imagination, and awareness of the power of storytelling slowly grew. Looking back, it now seem inevitable that I would try to tell stories of my own.
And in the fullness of time, I did. It took a lot of time and practice (and life experience) to take me to the point of telling tales with any degree of ability, but I got there. And with the advent of modern self-publishing, I now have something of a readership. I still read a fair amount of fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but without the feeling that I need to dive undercover and pull the lid over the top. (The recent exception to this being the so-called “Pandemic Year” of 2020, when I indulged heavily in “comfort reads.”) But where I most often find an escape from the real world these days is in the writing I do.
It’s every bit as possible to escape into an imaginary world of your own creation as a storyteller, as it is to become so involved with the tales of others that the real world fades away. To nonwriters, this sort of escape may seem to verge on the pathological, but if you’re a writer of fiction, you know to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back home. (And hope there are no mice following behind, of course.) I often get so wrapped up in my work that I lose track of time, and frequently walk around the house thinking out loud on some aspect of a current work in progress. When the work is done and published, it then has the potential to become an escape for anyone who comes along and reads what I’ve created. That’s an interesting feeling, and a pleasant one, to think that I might be giving some stressed-out soul, somewhere out there, a few hours of respite from whatever troubles them. It’s a motive to keep writing, all by itself. And why not? We’re all in this together. Every now and then we should get away from it all, and do so in good company.
Where A Demon Hides: War of the Second Iteration – Coda
The war is over and Humanity has prevailed, but victory came at a terrible price. The weapon used to bring down the enemy killed or injured as many people as it saved. One of the unintended casualties, Alicia MacGregor, has existed in a medically induced coma for two years while her neurological injuries were repaired.
At last, to the relief of family and friends, the time has come for her to awaken and rejoin the world. She is healed physically, but the trauma she endured in that final battle left deep scars in her heart and mind. As she copes with the burden of horror and grief left by the war, Alicia discovers that she is haunted by something far worse than bad memories. Something that first threatens her sanity, and then her life.
Currently available in ebook format from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.
I honestly can’t recall what aspect of my childhood instilled in me such a fascination with telling stories. Before I could write effectively, I told all sorts of windy tales to anyone who would listen. That so many of the adults around me seemed entertained by my childish flights of fancy kept me at it, completely oblivious to how they were humoring me. At some point I went from talking to writing things down. I have vague memories of turning scratch pads and scrap paper into “books.” That I was so serious about these efforts surely amused them all.
That I was encouraged from the very beginning to embrace literacy, both reading and writing, as things wonderful to do for their own sake, surely set the foundation for these habits. That a career as a writer was not what the adults were trying to set in motion only became obvious many years later.
Just before I finished high school, I sold a short magazine article to an aquarium hobby publication, about how to keep crayfish alive in a fish tank. I sent it with the idea of sharing ideas, not of getting paid, so imagine my surprise when the publishers thanked me for my contribution by sending a twenty-five-dollar check. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that my father had to co-sign the publishing agreement. I was all of seventeen years old.
That check put a dangerous idea into my head. Dangerous, that is, from the parental point of view. The idea was that you could make money doing something teachers and parents alike told me I was pretty good at. (I honestly thought they would approve.) At about that same time I read Isaac Asimov’s combined memoir and short story collection that chronicled his earliest career efforts as a writer of science fiction: The Early Asimov, or Eleven Years of Trying. Writing and selling fiction suddenly seemed doable. The idea became considerably more hazardous when I decided to write fiction; it became a goal, and one that started out much further ahead of me than I could possibly have imagined.
For the next thirty years or so, I made sporadic efforts to pursue this goal. I say sporadic because a succession of life changes and other distractions kept me from being as focused, or as disciplined, as I now know I needed to be. Still, in the late 1970s and through the mid-1980s, I made some money flipping the nonfiction side of the authorial coin. This didn’t last, as toward the end of that time the sort of publications that bought what I wrote were either merging with other publishing concerns, or dying outright. My markets slowly dwindled, and each year that passed saw me more reliant on the proverbial day job. I didn’t stop writing, though, and focused my efforts more on fiction, of which I sold not a word.
More life changes took place, including getting married and then deciding to finish the degree I’d left hanging when I moved from Illinois to Arizona. I did very little writing at all while working on the degree, except, of course, what was required for the classes I took. After graduation, I wrote yet another novel that I couldn’t sell. As I’ve told the tale elsewhere (in The Process), the market-based reason the book didn’t sell, combined with other unrelated problems, shut me down for several years. I just couldn’t see putting all that work into something that was apparently going nowhere.
Ebooks, print-on-demand, and being able to publish directly to the public changed all of this. Talk about a life changer! I took that novel the editors said they couldn’t find a market for, and self-published it. That last sentence covers a lot of details, and many intermediate steps before publication occurred, but suffice to say it was quite the learning curve. I climbed it, and on June 7th, 2012,The Luck of Han’angabecame available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Ten years have passed since that day. The War of the Second Iteration turned out to be a five-book series, not a trilogy. A story about a multiverse that contains science so advanced it might as well be magic unfolded in my mind, and I wrote a story about gryphons that were anything but mythical (The Gryphon Stone). A character from the Second Iteration series decided he had another tale to tell, and I obliged by writing All That Bedevils Us. And then there’s the one about the dog who needs a ride home, Toby. Most recently, I gave writing a love story a try, one with a fantastical twist, and so Variation on a Theme came into existence. These and others add up to ten books in that ten-year span. I’m immensely pleased with that output, but even happier with the receptions they have received.
Yes, the books sell, and that’s a thing that can only be gratifying. Some of them sell quite well, in fact, and this indie thing is easily paying its own way. But – far more important to me – people like what I write. There are readers out there urging me to write more, to get another book out – which I’m more than happy to do. I’ve even heard from a few readers who said something I wrote helped them get through dark times, by allowing them to escape for a while and come back to reality refreshed and better able to cope. Toby has led to a few dogs (and cats) finding forever homes. If there’s a better way to describe success as a writer, I can’t imagine it.
And now, about the next ten years…
(At the time of this essay, in celebration of a decade of successful indie publishing, all of my full-length novels in ebook format are marked down to just 99¢. Prices will return to normal June 30th, 2022.)
When I decided to self-publish fiction a little over nine years ago, I started with a space opera that turned into the five book series War of the Second Iteration. Science fiction was already my default setting, so I led off with the sort of fiction I know best. This was followed by The Gryphon Stone, a story that blends science fiction and fantasy. From the very beginning, I knew I would not limit myself to space opera style sci-fi. How far from this default setting I might stray wasn’t clear even to me until I published Toby, a story that has nothing of fantasy or science fiction in it at all. That project made it very clear to me that I should stop referring to myself as a science fiction writer and simply think of myself as a storyteller, one not overly concerned with genre constraints. It’s a more comfortable and, I believe, more honest assessment.
My newest book clearly reflects that decision. It’s not science fiction by any stretch, although two of the main characters are serious fans of that genre. Variation on a Theme is a fantasy, one set in the real world of the late 1970s. The fantasy element has nothing to do with any epic themes. There are no sword-swinging heroes, axe-wielding dwarves, or ancient wizards. It’s more of a metaphysical fantasy, one built around a very old idea. What would you do differently, given the chance to relive part of your life? What would you be willing to give up, to take that chance?
An old theme to be sure, and here is yet another variation on it.
The phrase “outside the box” may rate as one of the most over-used (if not actually abused) metaphors of our time. It’s all too often a glib admonition issued by a person passing the proverbial buck and expecting someone else to solve an intractable problem for them. If you’ve ever worked for a living in any capacity at all, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve heard it and heard the smug sarcasm that goes with it.
Used correctly, when faced with a situation in which others have failed to arrive at a solution to a problem, or when a creative person wants to pursue a new and innovative form of self-expression, the mental habit labeled “think outside the box” can be a powerful tool. It becomes a way to focus skills and imagination in a way that has the potential to create something new. I certainly have no problem hearing the phrase used in this context, being a fan of, and a participant in, the creative world myself. There’s definitely a place in the world for those who think outside the box. Or, more specifically, those who write outside the box.
Although the bulk of my writing has been in the science fiction genre, I haven’t exactly felt constrained by that single genre. Or even to the writing of fiction; my first book was the amateur astronomy-related memoir, Mr. Olcott’s Skies. I’ve also written short fiction of a darkly fantastical nature that might play well on a remake of The Twilight Zone, some of which can be found in 179 Degrees From Now. But I’m not sure any of this could honestly be referred to as writing outside the box. Rather, it’s more an indication that the box I’m sitting in has plenty of room in which to move around. After all, science fiction, fantasy, and astronomy are all, in their own ways, out there.
But I have now, beyond any realistic doubt, written outside that roomy box. Reached so far over the lid the damned thing tipped right over.
My most recent book, Toby, is neither sci-fi nor fantasy, and for sure has nothing to do with amateur astronomy. It’s a tale of a boy and his dog. Okay, so the main character has a few too many years on him to wear the label “boy” easily. And it isn’t his dog. Therein lies the tale. Or the tail, as the case may be. Like all the fiction I write, Toby started out as a handful of unrelated daydreams: images and scenes that just sort of coalesced in my imagination. Happens all the time, these daydreams. I’ve been an unrepentant woolgatherer all my life. Just ask any of my middle school teachers. In this most recent case, however, the usual elements of science fiction never materialized. This time it started with an ordinary guy confronting a large, growling dog, who it turns out isn’t growling at the guy. There’s this bear, you see. From that point, things get complicated.
Anyway, as sometimes happens, the daydream started to roll like a short film in my head, and all that stuff that builds up inside your brain due to life happening started mixing in. The guy was there for a reason, and so was the dog. The reason, once I puzzled it out, became the vague suggestion of a story. Closer examination led to questions about who they were, and why they were in that situation. Ideas rose into view. Some lent themselves well to the trail I needed to blaze, and others were best left to one side and forgotten. The meeting between man and dog turned into a journey, and once they were on the road, I quickly developed a clear sense of direction. To put it another way, the story developed a life of its own, an internal logic that directed its development. In other words, it told itself. I just worked the keyboard.
Okay, that doesn’t really happen, but that’s the way it feels, when it works just so.
All the way through the process of writing this short novel (or novella, depending on which definition based on word counts you prefer) I felt a growing sense of surprise and delight. Where was this all coming from? How was it that I was to be this tale’s author? It was, for me, a very different writing experience; fresh and new and exciting, writing of a sort I’d never even considered in the past. It was also a revelation of sorts, that I could write this way, that I could write outside of my comfortable and familiar box. There was a sense of greater possibilities than I’d considered before. I’ve written in the past of my writing process being something like exploring new lands and cutting trails through them for others to follow. Writing Toby was like traveling to a different continent and starting the process there.
The box is tipped over on its side now, and I’m sitting out on one of the flaps, quite comfortable and very pleased by how this all turned out. I wonder what else is outside the box, waiting for me? Well, while I ponder that one, meet Toby, a very good dog.
While organizing files associated with previously published work, I came across material that originally served as a prologue for The Courage to Accept, the fourth book in the War of the Second Iteration series. It was removed when I decided against making Andrew Kester a viewpoint character in the story. Something of what follows was ultimately incorporated into The Courage to Accept, when Kester explains to Jan Costa how he came to possess the answer to a major question regarding the Faceless. The following “deleted scene” gives the full story of how Kester first encountered the Faceless, and glimpses the horrifying truth about the nature of the enemy.
This offering – developed from that discarded prologue – will of course be of most interest to those who have read the War of the Second Iteration, just as a deleted scene included as a DVD bonus feature makes more sense after you watch that movie. I hope readers as yet unfamiliar with these books will enjoy it all the same. Better still, may it motivate you to give these books a try.
Either way, and as always, thanks for reading!
Thomas Watson
The Traitor and the Faceless
Andrew Kester sat on the gray cot, feet on the dull, scuffed floor and bald head bowed between hunched shoulders. The walls of his cell were a dull gray. The lighting in the cell had a flat, lifeless quality that he believed was incapable of casting shadows. Certainly, there were none beneath the toilet and sink that were the only other furnishings. The expression on his blunt, square face was as bleak as his surroundings, that of a man no longer young, holding inside himself a toxic mix of resentment, betrayal, and guilt.
Sorry, Jimmy. I should have followed your plan. Thought I saw a way to fix it all. Should have known better. You were always the smart one. I let you down.
Kester tried not to, but really had nothing better to do with his time than dwell on his failure. He would never have the chance to make that apology in person. He would never again live outside the facility holding his bare cell. For Kester, this was an article of faith. He believed it implicitly and absolutely. When he had inquired as to his trial date, the prison staff actually laughed. Kester took that to mean there would never be a trial, fair or otherwise. He expected to live what was left of his life in this dull, gray place, marooned out on the edge of civilization.
For Kester’s prison was near the fringe of known space, the far side of what star charts of the Republic labeled The Rift. Between the facility and the Republic was a zone in which stars, and their associated trans-dimensional nodes, were very few and far between. Outward from the prison was the sparsely and recently settled frontier of the Trans-Rift sector. All of this he knew because he had, very early in his career, been assigned here as part of an interrogation crew. He’d recognized it as soon as he was brought on board. The prison station itself had no proper name, just the designation RDF DET 1167. Of his current situation, this was all Kester, formerly a Commodore in the Republic Defense Force, knew for certain. His black-clad keepers would tell him nothing more. Grim people, those who managed the facility. Men for the most part; that there were women on the crew was no source of comfort, for they were as hard as their male colleagues. Harder at times. They spoke to him only when necessary, giving directions and issuing orders. If he resisted those orders, stunners were used. Once had been quite enough, on that count.
Kester had long since given up trying to draw people out and gain news of the universe beyond the dull gray bulkheads. He wanted very much to know what was going on. His overreach at the Pr’pri Star System had failed horribly and drawn the RDF fleet into the attempted coup, which they promptly brought to an end. Kester most wanted to know how things had fallen out in the Disputed Zone between Leyra’an space and the Republic, seeking clues to the fate of his friend James Calavone, instigator of the failed coup. He didn’t dare ask about Calavone. The Republic surely knew by now that their most wanted criminal was still alive and well, but Kester was damned if he would give even the smallest clue that might lead to Calavone’s arrest.
Somehow, Kester had survived the debacle that should have gone into the history books as the Last Battle of Pr’pri. His preference would have been to die with his ship, the redoubtable heavy cruiser Vengeance. An injury during the last desperate battle with the Leyra’an ship Han’anga had left him helpless, and some compassionate fool had made sure he was stuffed into an escape pod before the Vengeance transformed herself into a cloud of plasma when her engines blew up.
The RDF had taken him, whisked him deep into the Republic, not to put him on trial but to keep him somewhere safe and available for interrogation, until they decided what to finally do with him.
Somewhere safe.
Three times on the long journey to this prison out back of beyond, someone had tried to kill Kester. The three would-be assassins had died by their own hands when they failed. Kester had no doubt they were sent by James Calavone, and he really didn’t blame his friend.
Let you down, Jimmy, Kester thought as he contemplated his fate. Screwed up everything we worked for.
For not the first time, Kester was sorry the assassins had failed.
The temptation to take out his old adversary, Kr’nai Ersha, had simply been too great. Kester had been so certain it would work, and at first his plan had unfolded perfectly, delivering on his obligations to Calavone while putting Kester in just the right place to give him that moment of personal triumph. His task force had been on the point of overwhelming the defenses of Pr’pri Star System, when the RDF arrived. How had they known? How could they possibly have known? Kester was convinced he had been betrayed, and was equally certain he would never know the answer to the questions of culprit and circumstances.
Now he was slowly being driven mad by boredom, locked in a bland, gray world of gray clothing, gray food, and gray steel, populated by gray-clad prisoners and prison guards wearing unadorned black uniforms. Kester sat on his bunk, leaned his head back against a cold steel bulkhead, and sighed. He knew the time of day from the clock outside his cell, but had no idea what day it was, or the exact date and year. He was coming untethered in time, and that seriously bothered him for some reason.
The station’s daily cycle was as rigid as it was perfectly predictable. Which was why Kester was startled when he looked at that clock behind the officer on watch, out at the monitor station of the solitary confinement block. Lunch was late. It almost counted as an event worthy of note. Hard as these people were, they were also efficient, and things always happened the way they intended, when they intended. Delays of any sort were not tolerated by Commandant Worley. As Kester roused himself from his funk to consider this oddity, the lights flickered. They blinked again, and then the station’s general alert sounded. Kester came to his feet just in time to see the guard on duty rush to the door to the main corridor.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
There was no answer. Kester saw people hurrying through the corridor, briefly glimpsed beyond the man in the doorway. There was a muffled exchange of words, then the watch officer stepped out into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
The alert siren continued to wail and the lighting system dimmed and brightened twice more, then flickered rapidly before returning to a normal steady glow. A feeling of something not being right rose up in him, and almost at the same moment Kester understood why. The usual steady breath of fresh air circulating through the cell had been stilled. The ventilation system had failed. Only the ear-pop of decompression could be more alarming to one who had spent a life in space.
“Hey!” he yelled again, hoping the electronic monitor systems were still functioning. When no response came, he shook his head and turned to sit back down. Whatever the emergency, there was nothing he could do but sit quiet and conserve his strength. And his breath.
Kester hadn’t quite settled when the door to the solitary confinement block retracted and three men rushed into the outer room. Two clutched rifles in white-knuckled hands and stared back out into the corridor. The third was Commandant Quint Morley, who had a sidearm drawn and ready, and wore a grimace of stark fear on his normally round, bland face. “Morley! What the hell’s going…”
Morley punched something on the vacant duty station. He looked at Kester and said, “Out!”
The bars slid away on Kester’s right even as Morley barked the order and Kester stepped out of the cell. Before he could react to the abrupt change in his situation, Morley headed out the door and into the corridor at a trot. The troopers with him hesitated just a moment, and Kester took his cue, following Morley at the same pace. It was immediately obvious that the armed men following him were far more interested in what might be behind them than in what their prisoner might do. Which made no sense to Kester, and more than anything else to that point worried him.
“Morley, what’s this all about?”
“Keep moving, Kester! Just keep moving! I’m damned if I’m leaving anyone to those fiends. Not even you.” All of it said without so much as a backward glance.
“What in God’s name is…”
“God has nothing to do with this!” Morley snapped.
They jogged through an intersection. From the passage on his left Kester heard weapons firing and voices raised in fear and anger. Morley led them straight on, and spoke into the com unit fastened to his collar. “Jepson, status! Good, you only need to hold the bastards a few more minutes. Davis will be ready to blow that deck any time now. Davis? Don’t make me a liar, Davis. What’s your status? Right, okay, it’ll have to be enough.”
Kester’s alarm was swept away by a cold rush of adrenaline. Blow a deck? Last resort for a station being boarded. It sounded like they were fighting for their very lives.
Morley was still talking. “Peterson! Transport One, status? Good! We’re on our way. Palmer has the rest of the prisoners on their way to you and Transport Two. Jepson! Fall back to the core, now! Meet us there and we’ll take the VIP launch.”
They turned a corner and flat-out ran the short distance to a lift station. Kester didn’t hesitate, but matched their pace. He was beyond asking questions. His gut told him they were on the edge of disaster, even if he didn’t understand the cause. From the right, down the corridor that fronted the lift station, came a dozen men and women, all of them with rifles. Two of them wore prison garb.
“Right on our asses, sir,” the leader of the group said between gasps of breath. “Not a lot of them, but they’re here.”
“Don’t take a lot of them,” muttered one of Morley’s people.
Morley cursed and slammed the call button. The station shuddered suddenly and people clutched at each other for support. “That was deck nine, where they first came aboard. Let’s hope that buys us the time we need to get clear.”
“We’ll need it, when the reactor blows,” a prison guard said.
“Oh, shit!”
The woman who had cursed was raising her weapon, and Kester looked in the direction of her aim. The corridor was filled with silvery forms, generally humanoid in shape, some taller than others. The armed men around him formed a line and opened fire. Where the advancing beings were hit, they vanished into clouds of glittering dust. The attackers surged forward, heedless of loss, and for a moment came within arm’s reach before being driven back. In that moment they made physical contact with a prisoner and a guard. Both men screamed, voices shrill with agony, then fell writhing to the deck, gleaming with silver light that seemed to come from within. They were swept back with the silvery white horde as it retreated.
Kester caught the rifle of one victim before it hit the deck, and started shooting. The defense was hot enough that the creatures drew back all the way to the next intersection, where they regrouped. One of the taller creatures faced him, and where a face should have been there was only a blank, silver space. Suddenly it had a face for real. It shifted, transformed, became recognizable.
With a shout of outright terror, Kester shot the thing, reducing it to a cloud of shining dust. The rifle was on full automatic and his spasm of fear kept the trigger engaged even as someone grabbed him from behind and hauled him into the lift. His last shot blew a hole in the lift capsule’s hatch.
“Jesus, Kester!” Morley shouted.
“That wasn’t real, that wasn’t real!” Terrified and disbelieving, Kester couldn’t stop the words rushing out. “That wasn’t him! Couldn’t have been him! No, it couldn’t…”
Morley twisted him around and slammed him into the wall of the capsule. “Kester! Get a grip, we need you!” Then, into his com, said, “Transports One and Two, depart immediately and make for the alternode. We blew the deck they boarded, but that’s not going to hold them. We’ll take the VIP launch and follow you.”
“What about that ship out there?” one of the guards asked. “Damned thing’s a heavy cruiser.”
“And it’s right on top of us,” Morley replied. “Four minutes and this whole place blows. Their ship is close enough to be disabled, at least. But I’ll settle for the diversion giving us time to make a break for it.” Morley glared at Kester. “You get to keep the gun, for now. All hands on deck.”
“Understood.” He didn’t, not really, but Kester knew then they really were fighting for their lives. He was, before anything else, a soldier. He shook himself and took a deep breath, fighting for self-control.
The lift capsule was shifting them toward the core, and the feeling of up and down faded away. Every time something clicked or banged those crowding inside with Kester gasped and looked around.
“Jepson? God, it’s good to hear your voice! How many of – ah, damn it! I’m sorry, son. It’s not your fault. Best possible speed. Get the hell out.” Morley looked like he was about to burst into tears. “Half my command,” he said through his teeth. “Half of my people. God damn it!”
Kester only half-followed the exchange, his thoughts clouded by what he had seen, the face of the silver apparition. Not him! Not him! Can’t be him. How could it…?
“What the hell were those things?” Kester demanded, shaking himself out of that circle of thought. “What’s going on?”
When Morley set his jaw and said nothing, one of the uniformed prison guards unbent from the usual unresponsive posture. “No one knows. It’s some kind of invasion. Been hearing reports from all over the Trans-Rift frontier. These ships, RDF designs, appear but don’t answer hails. Then they attack with boarding parties of those – things. Don’t need weapons. They just come on until they can touch you. You’re dead, then. After word is received of an attack, nothing else is heard.”
“Hell, systems are dropping out of the loop without a word,” someone behind Kester added.
The lift capsule slowed to a stop; they left it as quickly as possible. They were in the small, brightly lit null-g docking facility of the station. The tube beside theirs released another half dozen men and women, all armed, all clearly and grimly frightened. Some of the men wore prison garb; no one seemed to notice or care.
Kester followed Morley into the passenger compartment of the VIP launch, flipping the safety on his rifle as he did so. He found himself small ship that had clearly not been design for prisoner transport. The compartment held rows of comfortably padded seats and there was fancy holographic projector in the ceiling of the forward end. There was a null-g wet bar on the bulkhead opposite the airlock. The disconnect between his surroundings and his bizarre circumstances blossomed into something like a waking nightmare.
People were moving too quickly, fumbling with straps and buckles in the crowded space. Curses were muttered between clenched teeth. The hatch to the command compartment was open and the pilot leaned into view. His short white hair was mussed and spiked out as he glared back at the crowd for a few seconds until he found Morley, who had taken the seat beside Kester’s. “Where’s the senator?” the pilot demanded.
“Dead,” Morley replied. “Saw him go down, along with his staff.”
“One of those things was wearin’ his face,” someone behind Kester said.
The ship shuddered violently and the pilot faced forward, tapped keys on instruments, then cursed vividly. “We’re boosting!”
Morley twisted in his seat and shouted, “Grab something. Now!”
Those not yet secured in seats scrambled and flailed. A woman in black was free-floating near Kester, nowhere near a seat or even a take-hold loop. He grabbed her leg and hauled her down. Without a word of protest, she curled against him, holding tight.
It felt as if something had kicked the ship sideways, a lurch that nearly tore his fellow passenger loose. At least two people were not so lucky, and Kester heard their bodies hit the bulkhead, wincing at the gasps of pain that followed. He saw Morley turn a horrid shade of paste white, clutching at the armrests of his seat. A moment later the kick was replaced by several seconds of crushing force as the ship’s main engines fired. The woman he held gasped and whimpered, and Kester was certain his chest would be crushed as acceleration pushed her down onto him.
Acceleration was mercifully brief. From the sounds that followed, more than one of his fellow refugees had been hurt, and quite possibly badly injured at that. Kester released the woman, a prison guard he remembered as one of the less friendly of the crew. Their eyes met and she nodded a wordless thanks, then performed a null-g crawl to the nearest seat and strapped herself in. “We’re clear and headed away,” the white-haired pilot of the VIP launch announced. “Transport One and Two report the same.”
“Show us what’s happening,” Morley demanded.
A holograph filled the forward display area. The unadorned space station was front and center, a fat ring connected by three spokes to a long, slim spindle. Just beyond it was what looked like an RDF heavy cruiser, a sight that brought a puzzled frown to Kester’s face. The Leyra’an had copied Human warships; were they behind all of this? Something in his gut denied it. Kester knew the Leyra’an better than most veterans of the long war with snake-skinned people. The things they’d shot in the corridor had nothing to do with the Leyra’an.
Small objects were pulling away from the station, headed toward them. Someone pointed that out.
“God,” said Morley. “If they reach us…”
“Missiles?” Kester asked.
“Some sort of transport device,” Morley replied, shaking his head. “That’s how they boarded the station. They…”
With a flare of light so bright the imaging system couldn’t quite control the glare – almost everyone looked away and blinked – the station turned into a ball of incandescent gas. The cruiser parked beside it vanished into the glare, then added its own explosion to the lurid display of destruction. All of the small transports vanished into the conflagration.
No one cheered. Someone half-whispered, “Holy Christ, it worked!”
“Davis was right,” Morley said as if speaking to himself. “The reactor was big enough. May God accept and keep his soul.”
Kester stared forward at the expanding ball of glowing gas and debris. For one horrible moment the silvery after-image, in hue so very much like the shining humanoids he had seen on the station, lingered in his vision. His imagination and memory, in a heartbeat of perversity, supplied the face Kester had seen on the creature he had destroyed. Fear and disbelief curdled within him, threatening to become nausea.
It wasn’t him! That’s just not possible!
In the moment before Kester had fired the rifle and killed the silver demon, it had worn the face of a friend. The friend he had accidentally betrayed.
If not for the intervention of the insectoid beings called the T’lack, the Faceless War would have ended with the extinction of Humanity and its Sibling Species. That intervention came at a great cost for the T’lack. No one knows or understands Humanity’s debt to the T’lack better than Jan Costa, who paid his own terrible price at the end of that war.
Now the T’lack are themselves in grave danger, facing a devastating civil war between rival factions and threatened by a mysterious race of beings on the far side of T’lack space.
Jan Costa leads a multi-species expeditionary force into the unknown, seeking to save his alien friends both from themselves and the new threat they have aroused. What he discovers out beyond the frontier will change everything, with the very existence of the T’lack hanging in the balance.
In a recent conversation, I said something to the effect of seeing much of my life in the rearview mirror. The friend with whom I had this conversation found this observation morbid and disturbing, and said so in no uncertain terms. A natural enough reaction for a member of a species acutely aware of its own mortality, a species that has built entire religions in denial of this simple and awesome fact. A reaction and a denial, and one that utterly missed my point.
I see nothing at all morbid about making such an assessment. At sixty-two years of age, and given the current average life expectancy of a healthy, non-smoking American male human being, it is simply the truth that more than half my time is now behind me. Barring miraculous medical advances that, being an average American, I wouldn’t be able to pay for in the first place, I need to be aware of that rear view. It isn’t morbid, it’s motivational. Now is not the time for relaxed complacency. Looking behind, looking ahead, and doing the math prompts me to get a move on. Time is not on my side, and there are things to do. There are stories to tell. More stories than I know how to count.
Writing is a time-consuming occupation, and when you count yourself among the independently published, you must add the time needed for various acts of self-promotion to the ticking clock ledger. It adds up fast. In the time since I first decided to give this a try – a decision made in late 2010 that I have not and never will regret – my chief limiting resource has been time. When I launched this enterprise I was unemployed and about all I did was write, sometimes three thousand or more words a day. That episode lasted fourteen months, and in the years since, I’ve balanced writing with a thirty-hour-a-week job. It seemed at first to be a good balance, and it did in fact work well, right up to the point that I released the last volume of War of the Second Iteration.
I’d waited on attempting meaningful self-promotion until completing that series, with the goal of launching such efforts with the entire project waiting there for readers to discover. It worked. Periodically making the first book – The Luck of Han’anga – available as a free download has driven sales of the subsequent volumes to a gratifying degree. But the time spent managing such promotions, minimal as they really are, does cut into writing time. To do more than my current promotional activities – and I truly need to do so – presents a quandary. If I’m doing that, I’m not stringing words together, and the timely release of new work (without of course compromising on quality) is as important as promoting previously released material. My attempts to find some sort of compromise allowing both activities to be done well has created only conflict and frustration. Existing books are selling, but sporadically and slowly. My promotional activities are a mere token. And the writing of my next book drags on and on…
Over the past year it became steadily more obvious that what I’m trying to do will never be accomplished under the current arrangement. The best it seemed I could hope for was to endure this state of affairs until I could retire in either 2021 or 2022, a truly depressing prospect.
It was decided to see if something could be done to close the gap. Numbers were crunched, financial strategies were altered and moved forward, and fingers were crossed. This past summer it was determined that we could, if we were careful, bridge the gap to my official retirement without relying on a regular paycheck on my part. The numbers were there, they were correct, and I held back. Having spent most of my adult life working to make sure I was working, letting go of that financial lifeline and taking even a relatively short leap of faith took more nerve than I expected. It was a solid month before I was at ease with the decision (as much as I’ll ever be), and longer before I took that deep breath and said the magic words… “I quit.”
It should be noted here that the decision was in no way an indictment of the job, much less the good people I worked for and with. Sure, there were conflicts, and there were a few people I just never could get on with. Show me a job where this is not true. My situation in total, however, was intolerable, and something had to give.
On October 31, 2018, I stopped staring into the future as if I stood with my toes over the edge of a cliff. I didn’t take a first step – I jumped. All or nothing. Time to be what I’ve always wanted to be, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to be, no matter what diversions and distractions pulled me first one way and then another during my life. Time to turn from the mirror and face the road ahead. To be the writer, the teller of tales from this day forward.
Under Desert Stars 