By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of Kindle Nation Daily ©Kindle Nation Daily 2010
Maybe I am dating myself, but for me, the premise of every work of speculative fiction calls to mind the black and white image of Rod Serling walking casually toward me, cigarette in hand, from out of the big old Stromberg Carlson TV that was in our living room when I was 10 years old, and intoning…
“Imagine, if you will….”
Through my decades of reading one thing I’ve noticed is that, if a truly imaginative story is going to take hold of me, I’m almost invariable drawn in from the very first sentences.
The premise will be as evident as the writer’s command, and both unfold seamlessly before I have any chance to throw up a force field of resistance.
So it is with today’s Free Kindle Nation Short, an excerpt from LK Rigel’s award-winning novella Space Junque.
Here’s the set-up:
The world is on the brink of ecological cataclysm set off by the Oil Spill of 2010 and exacerbated by the Sea Level Rise of 2070. When the Defenders of Gaia set off dirty bombs in random cities, Char Meadowlark accepts an invitation to visit the Imperial Space Station until the terror subsides.
Mike Augustine, Char’s connection on the station, wants more than friendship, but Char is attracted to Jake Ardri, the pilot who transports her off planet in his shuttle, the Space Junque.
War escalates into world-wide environmental cataclysm, and Char is stranded in orbit on the Space Junque. She and her fellow refugees encounter terrorists, shapeshifters and a demanding goddess in a changing new world order. Mike makes romantic moves on Char, but her heart is drawn to Jake, the shuttle pilot who rescued her.
But is love even possible in flagrante apocalypto?
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An Excerpt from
Space Junque
Space Junque
A Novella By LK Rigel
Copyright 2002, 2010 by LK Rigel and reprinted here with her permission.
Chapter 1 – Let’s Get the Hell Off This Rock
Ghosts would stay off the roads. Why risk an encounter with Homeland Security? But when Char Meadowlark floored the Malibu, their heads popped up all over the fields along Baseline Road. Don’t hit anybody. Don’t hit anybody. Don’t hit anybody.
By the time any of them realized she wasn’t IHS, she’d be out of range even if one had a vehicle. She just hoped some ghost kid didn’t wander out in front of her.
This stretch of putrid fields was condemned by the EPA. While the corporate owners appealed court orders to clean the site, the tainted rice and flax had become home to ghosts and vermin and great white herons. It was said the fields were so polluted that raptors wouldn’t hunt here.
Not that Char believed that stuff about raptors.
At the train tracks a heron perched on the listing stop sign. No train would come, but out of habit she slowed. The bird seemed to disapprove of her classic 2031 Chevy. Yeah, its oil-based fuel system was embarrassing, but she had the carbon credits.
Besides, she had to make the launch, and she had no other way to get to the airport.
Smoke billowed up from downtown Sacramento, black on gray rising into the orange afternoon sky. She slid the zoom on her sunglasses’ camera and projected the image onto the windshield. 801 K Street was burning, flames shooting through smoke on the top floors.
Mike had better be right that the launch was still secure. It’s Sacramento, Char.The DOGs have higher priority targets. Maybe the fire at K Street was just another maintenance issue. The old capital city had gone to hell since the Imperial Congress abolished California and the other state governments.
On Interzone-5 she raced past a few CitiCars in the commuter lane, risking nothing but the psychic wrath of her eco-betters. No cops gave speeding tickets anymore. Waste of personnel.
Get to the terminal and don’t bother parking. Just leave your car on the street. Go to the shuttle boarding gate. You’re on the list.
She had thought Mike was being overdramatic, demanding she come up to the space station for a visit. He was just trying to scare her out of the cocoon she’d crawled into after what happened to Sky. And Brandon.
Well, it was working.
The airport was guarded by Imperial Homeland Security. No enviros got past them, not even the DOGs. At the gate, two cars waited ahead of her. While a guard chatted with the first driver, more vehicles pulled up in line.
Forty minutes to launch. Cutting it close, but Mike had said her ID would put her in the terminal’s express queue.
The chat at the head of the line disintegrated into an argument. IHS poured out of the guard shack and surrounded the vehicle with weapons drawn, officers screaming at the occupants to get out.
The car in front of Char pulled out of line and drove away. Two more behind her followed. Everybody hated IHS. She had the urge to leave too, despite being such an upstanding citizen. Hell, at university, she and her sister had both won Imperial internships. People called them the hydro twins. Sky was a hydropower engineer and Char a hydroponics agronomist.
IHS didn’t care about that. Everybody was a potential person of interest.
Cripes. Ghosts got out of the car. What possibly made them think they could pass? These must be new if they still had the will to mix in society, but even the kids were just skin and bones. Poor things.
On IHS recommendation ghosts had been declared anathema by Imperial decree. Rights advocates argued that ghosting was not a disease but a mutation. Their theory: after exposure to a critical level of toxicity, the ghosting gene switched on and a person became pathologically apathetic.
Ghosts didn’t eat, didn’t work or sing or play. Didn’t make love. No one knew why they didn’t die of starvation.
The officers took the ghosts away and moved their car, motioning Char forward. She showed the ID card Mike had emailed half an hour ago.
“Sorry you were delayed, ma’am.” The guard smiled pleasantly and waved her through. As the gate slid open, she let out her breath and cruised onto the airport loop.
Cars and buses were parked at haphazard angles all over the road, more of them the closer she got to the terminals. Two hundred yards from the buildings, she abandoned the Malibu.
She slung her backpack over one shoulder. The world might implode, but she’d have a toothbrush and fresh underwear. She zipped her ID into her flight pants.
The comfortable loose pants with multiple zippered pockets on the legs had come into fashion when Vacation Station opened to civilians. Char never thought she’d wear them on an actual flight. Too bad her top was a spandex tube with a single strap, not at all proper for the Imperial Shuttle, but Mike had said to waste no time changing clothes.
A sickly blend of excitement and nausea swept over her. Of course she wouldn’t see the car again. It would be stolen as soon as things calmed down a bit, well before she got back. But she wasn’t coming back, was she?
It was the ghosts. There were so many in the fields this time. Too many. The Pacific Zone must be headed for quarantine, and Mike knew it. He couldn’t breach security by telling her, but he could invite her up, then send her to a clean zone when she returned to the planet surface.
He was a good guy. The best. He’d really watched out for her since Sky was lost. If only Sky had married Mike when he asked. They might have lived together. Sky would be up there above the clouds today instead of buried half a mile below ground.
Char set the Malibu’s admin program to ANY DRIVER and left the carbon credit voucher in the glove box. There was still gas in the tank. Someone who couldn’t catch a flight might use it to get somewhere safe. Safe. As if the word meant something.
At the terminal sidewalk the crackle of ack-ack filled the sky. A private jet without greenlights escaped through the smoke of tiny explosions. Enviros must have set up an anti-aircraft battery outside the airport’s perimeter.
Not DOGs. Please, not DOGs.
Inside, the air buzzed with a low hum of impending hysteria. Monitors showed the burning K Street building on a loop spliced with random scenes of mayhem and War on Terra in the crawl. Nothing unusual in that, but the talking heads did seem more breathless than usual, excited. Something different was happening. Real news.
“The DOGs call themselves radical environmentalists,” the news anchor said to a familiar expert. “But they destroy another little piece of the planet every day, don’t they, Don?”
“DOG stands for Defenders of Gaia, Nancy, so you’re right. It is an ironic name. They believe the only way to save Gaia, as they call the earth, is to wipe out the technology which they posit is destroying the planet.”
The Imperial boarding gate was on the mezzanine. Char got on the escalator behind a woman with a small boy who repeatedly jumped up and down though the woman kept telling him to stop. Shib. Char was getting a headache, either from stress or lack of caffeine.
The little boy missed his step and fell into Char, and they both stumbled against a huge guy in flame-colored overalls. The label on his chest read Imperial Homeland Security.
“Hey now, young man. You don’t want to be doing that.” He scooped up the boy and steadied Char, his voice pleasant and concerned. Not a jerk. “You don’t want to be stuck in California just now.”
The woman went stone silent, sweat breaking out above her eyebrows.
California. The old state name sounded odd coming from IHS. They usually insisted on using Pacific Zone, never California or Oregon or Washington. At the mezzanine, he stepped off to the right, his free arm on Char’s elbow, guiding her away from the human stream that flowed toward the screeners.
He asked for Char’s ID and put the little boy down. The woman’s eyes were wild as she grabbed the boy, “Shibadeh, do you want me to leave you for the raptors?”
A collective gasp erupted all around, not at the curse word but at the mention of raptors. The woman broke into sobs, hugging the child, glaring at the onlookers. Everybody was starting to crack.
“Raptors.” Char tried to sound light-hearted. “They’ve replaced the bogeyman.” She wasn’t enthusiastic about children herself but acknowledged their necessity. She hoped the IHS guy wouldn’t mark the woman’s license. It was hard enough to get clearance to have one, and who could blame anybody for stressing when the entire zone was freaking out?
But he wasn’t paying attention to the woman or the boy. He was looking at Char’s ID, nodding. “You’re pre-cleared.” Her card was blue level, another favor from Mike. “I’ll take you to your gate.”
“How do you know where I’m going?”
“You got a blue card, you’re getting off this rock.” He could play for the Corporate League, he was so big; but for IHS he wasn’t very scary. Maybe it was true that Homeland Security treated people with blue cards better.
It would have taken an hour to get through the screeners, but the IHS guy took Char past them. You got a blue card, you’re getting off this rock.
In the pre-cleared terminal, a man at the coffee kiosk could have been a cover model for Natural Man Today. There was nothing enhanced about him. Dark brown eyes and unprocessed medium brown hair, casually shaggy but not too long, broad shoulders — beautiful. And calm. A touchstone of peace in the maelstrom.
Char was more interested in the coffee. She grabbed the IHS guy’s arm. “Do I have time? I need to get some caffeine in my body.”
Natural Man scanned her from boots to bare shoulders. “It would be a crime to deprive that body of anything it wanted.”
Jerk. But to her surprise she responded to his suggestive gaze.
He recognized the IHS guy. “So, Tyler. I take it you found that package?”
“Being delivered as we speak,” the IHS guy, Tyler, said. “Did you get clearance?”
“Cleared and waiting for you.”
“You got it, Jake. As soon as I make sure Ms. Meadowlark gets her place on the Imperial Shuttle.”
“Blue carder, must be nice.” Jake turned back to Char. He had great teeth and a dangerous smile. “There’s an interesting bar on the ISS. The Blue Marble. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. My junk is slow, but it eventually gets me where I need to go.”
“Such beauty spoiled by such bad jokes.” She wished she hadn’t said that.
“You think I’m beautiful?” He spread his arms as if he were on display. His flight pants were the real thing: olive green, sturdy canvas, the pockets actually full.
“She’s phoenix,” Tyler said, not like a warning exactly, but a reminder.
There was a firebird logo on her ID, but she didn’t know it meant anything. Tyler might have said she’s a mutant, the way Jake took a step back.
“Right,” Jake said. “If you’re coming with me, you’d best hurry. I’m leaving –” he looked at Char “– as soon as I get some caffeine in my body.”
Tyler swung her backpack over his shoulder. “We should get to the gate.”
“Meadowlark,” Jake said. “Now that’s…real pretty.” Not safe, not like Brandon. “Sure you don’t want to see my junk?”
“Oh, groan,” she deadpanned. “Let’s go, Tyler.”