All posts by Jim Zoetewey

Arc 6.5: Glory

Glory: Part 1

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I felt Travis grab my arm as I stepped toward the door, and said, “Hang on!”

Jaclyn and Travis jumped with me as I gave the rockets fuel, and that was all for the best. The Rocket suit wasn’t meant to carry people. Sure, you could carry people. You could carry several people, but let’s put it this way—if a car were falling off a bridge, and I was the only chance for the people inside to survive… well… those people were likely to have a very short life.

This was bad for a whole lot of reasons, but mostly because it wasn’t at it’s best maneuvering while carrying three people, two from my right arm, one with my left. The right rockets had to compensate by putting out more force on that side just to keep us from listing to one side or the other.

This made all turns a little sluggish. If you hypothetically happened to be flying above the Hudson River while pieces of a spaceship fell from above, this was more than a little inconvenient.

The HUD said, [COLLISION ALERT].

Continue reading Glory: Part 1 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 37

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My helmet adjusted to the lack of light at about the same time the ship dropped a few feet. A warning beeped, and I dropped a few feet, preparing for a landing. The Hrrnna must have had effective night vision because many of the remaining ones turned to aim their weapons at me.

I opened up everything I had at them, putting the few remaining killbots into efficiency mode—which meant that instead of exploding upon entering a body, they’d make holes in opponents initially and only explode if the opponent wouldn’t go down, or if they were nearly out of fuel.

I’d created a really elegant algorithm to calculate the best use of a group of bots on multiple targets. I felt proud if its efficiency, but I’d felt a little sick when I thought about what it actually did. Continue reading Stardock: Part 37 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 36

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All of us looked at each other. I don’t know what the others were thinking, but in that moment I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t know how much force Vaughn and Sean could create between the two of them, but I doubted they could stop the ship from hitting the ground—not if it were under power at any rate.

If we knocked the power out, it was still an open question.

Not to mention that I remembered how they handled a ship during the training exercise. It wasn’t the same situation, but it was still a disaster with a big ship.

For a second, it seemed like the best option might be to see if the Hrrnna would give us a second chance at letting them go. Continue reading Stardock: Part 36 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 35

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“Push the button, Control,” Haley talked at a normal volume, but the intensity in her voice made it seem louder.

Kayla’s voice came through. She started to say, “I…” hesitated, and said, “You’re all right there.”

“We’ll be fine,” Haley said, sounding just as intense as before. “Now!”

Man-machine’s voice came over the comm at almost the same time, “Now, dammit!”

Continue reading Stardock: Part 35 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 34

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Izzy closed her eyes, opened them, and pointed toward the far end of the engine room. “Is it the middle, more on the left side than the right?”

Rachel turned, not saying anything. When she turned back to us, she said, “That’s it.”

Izzy’s mouth tightened. “They’re not coming for us. They’re gathering there. If we want to stop the ship, we’ll have to kill them.”

She stared ahead, “I hate this.”

Continue reading Stardock: Part 34 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 33

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Jaclyn’s eyes flicked toward the fusion generator and then back to me. “You’re not going to ask me to smash it are you? Because that sounds like a bad idea.”

I shook my head. “No. I wasn’t thinking of doing that. We’d probably all die.”

Jaclyn eyed me. “You think? So how were you planning to trash their plant?”

“Well, there are emergency procedures in case you need to shut it off. This generator looks a lot like the jet’s. It should be easy.”

Jaclyn smiled. “Kind of like how Rook’s headquarters wasn’t supposed to contain nerve gas.” Continue reading Stardock: Part 33 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 32

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I couldn’t understand a bit of the language—not that that surprised me.

Travis stepped through the hole in the exhaust tube, his form nearly transparent to me, and (I assumed) completely transparent to whatever was out there. In his place, I didn’t think I would have simply left.

Still, despite being hugely muscled and nearly seven feet tall, Travis could sneak around much better than I could. Throw invisibility in there, and I had to admit, he’d probably done the right thing. At any rate, he’d done one of a few possible “right things.”

I had no right to complain. We needed a scout then, and he was the best person to do it with Rachel scouting further up the ship.

Continue reading Stardock: Part 32 →

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 31

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Opening a comm connection to Red Hex, I asked, “How long will the invisibility last?”

Samita took a breath. A quick check of her position showed that she’d been running. That was smart. “Five minutes.”

“Thanks,” I said, and cut off the connection. Five minutes was enough. By that time we’d be where we needed to be or we’d be dead—possibly both.

Burning light from the space ship continued to incinerate everything around the building including the aliens’ own dead.

Meanwhile, transparent forms disappeared into Portal’s gates bare instants before they would have been destroyed. I was pretty sure the people in the ship weren’t targeting them. They were targeting everything. Continue reading Stardock: Part 31 →

Pen and Cape Society

Two Things

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I’ve got two things to talk about. The first one’s fun. The second is a little more mixed (but not bad).

First then, I’ve joined up with a bunch of other superhero fiction authors to create a group for mutual promotion. It’s called The Pen and Cape Society. Please check out the website. For what it’s worth, I wrote  a short “origin story” for how I came to write superhero fiction.

Some of you may have seen the second thing in the comments of the most recent post, but I thought I’d address it in it’s own post where people are likely to actually read it.

1889 Labs put out the first Legion of Nothing book, and they did a great job. Unfortunately the owner of 1889 Labs (a small press) has had to deal with a series of unfortunate life events. The result is that he won’t be putting out any more books for a while.

The practical result of that is that I’m on my own with regards to publishing. This isn’t the end of the world, but it requires a bit of work on my part. Also, a bit of money. Why money? I’d like to rehire the same artist as we used for the first cover, and have someone go over the final draft for typos (some of which will likely have been introduced by editing).

Thus, I’ll likely do a Kickstarter campaign in the next month or two. Hopefully there will be a good response.

 

Arc 6.4: Stardock

Stardock: Part 30

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Unshielded engines were a spaceship’s weak point in combat. That and anyplace they predictably thinned the shields—like weapon hardpoints. Anyone who’d trained on spacecraft knew it. There were a host of techniques to minimizing your chances of dying—ranging from special shields to keeping changes of direction brief. It wasn’t as if you slowed down very quickly in space.

Most of the defenses were oriented toward spaceships though because any living being that attempted to sneak past working engines would quickly become well done.

I had every reason to hope that didn’t apply to Izzy. Continue reading Stardock: Part 30 →