Dan Melson's Blog

Recently, the page was attacked by people trying to send out spam.Evidently, Movable Type of the version I had is vulnerable, and updating within Movable Type is severely costly.The solution is I will have to move things to Word Press. It's going to take a while to get the old articles up. You'll know it has started when this message disappears, but it's going to have to be done manually.

Petra was entertaining unexpected guests.Thane Jarfredir was an ambitious merchant, raised to the nobility because King Edvard thought he could do a better job running a fief than some younger son of the nobility who'd never learned anything more than sword-craft and putting on airs. He'd and his family and eight of his guards arrived at our front gate without notice, and Petra had been polite enough to let him in, without inquiring of his errand. That might have been dangerous were Petra and our children not already the three most accomplished wizards (after myself) in the kingdom of Treemount, if not all of Migurd. We kept barely a dozen guards of our own resident in the tower barracks, plus a few more dwelling in the city of Treemount. The other jarls of the kingdom kept at least twice as many; even some of the thanes kept more. But Ygg was not an extensive fief, only valuable. We had Kiltig's old tower and Ygg itself, and a few acres more, all within the walls of Treemount the city.Servants were not something we kept in huge numbers, either. Four women in the kitchen, ten more, mostly women, for domestic duties, and a steward to organize both them and the guards. The imposition of over a dozen unexpected guests was not an insignificant strain upon them, and Ioen the steward was getting older. We had the room, but the cooks had planned on thirty-three, not forty-eight, and the domestics hadn't had lead time to prepare rooms that were rarely used. The guards could be housed in a spare barracks on the second level, but Thane Jarfredir, his wife, and their seven children needed to be housed suitably for noble visitors, which meant the rooms needed to be swept, aired out, and freshened up in short order.Fortunately, one of the perks of auros was telepathy. What is their business? I inquired of Petra.They haven't said yet.They didn't warn us of their coming. Nor are they our vassals. We would be within our rights to refuse them.Nonsense, husband! I receive far too few opportunities for visitors!She had a point. King Edvard and Queen Veronia were ensconced in their own residence barely a league distant, and the Jarl of Treemount was even closer. While she could move as easily as I could to visit her friend the Queen, their majesties were painfully aware of the limited hospitality we had to offer, and playing hostess was a rare treat for her. Had I wanted the requirements of being king, I wouldn't have supported Edvard for the job. I hadn't even wanted to be a jarl, but Petra enjoyed the perks of being wife to the kingdom's most important noble. It gave her precedence over every woman except the queen, and she enjoyed frosting the sort of jealous, petty-minded noblewomen who made lives hell for anyone they could. Ten thousand years in in her previous role of seductress taught her the tricks of drawing male attention to herself, and the body she wore didn't hurt anything. She appeared just the age of full physical maturity. Her dusky, light brown skin glowed with health, soft medium brown hair with just a touch of wave, stopping above her shoulders, a fit body that she clothed modestly, as proper for a mother with two children, never mind she looked more like their older sister by the standards of Migurd. She never wore anything complex or outrageous, and kept her hair clean and simple. No remarkable features, but it all fit together well. Put her in commoner clothes, and she'd be the Woman From The Next Farm Over. Men's eyes followed her constantly. Most importantly, she was happy, which not only magnified the attraction but was supremely important to me. She was a gem."Thane Jarfredir," I began, formally addressing him, "My lady wife has welcomed you happily, as she gets far too few opportunities to act as hostess. But she has been unable to inform me of the nature of your visit? Is it simple friendliness or is there a business reason for your visit?" I could have ripped it out of his mind, but absent a compelling reason that would make me a mind-rapist. "Jarl Alexan, I am but newly raised to my station. One thing that has been made clear to me is that the other nobles of the kingdom have family ties to fall back upon for mutual support. We are two of the few exceptions, and I thought my second daughter Gridda was of an age with your son, near enough. Why not betroth the two of them to make us family?"What would I do? Keep her as a pet? Ansharos sent to me, and also his mother and sister. The ultsi gift bred true - as far as anyone in my homeland knew, forever. Both he and Catharin had been wizards in Petra's womb.I think you deserve her! Catharin transmitted an exaggerated image of the daughter in question - about thirteen years of age, red-haired, bony, and buck-toothed, with a noticeable overbite. Probably four years older than Ansharos, and still physically a child. With poor nutrition, puberty might not arrive here until as late as eighteen.That will be enough of that, I reprimanded them privately, just because she wasn't given everything you were does not make her less worthy of respect. You and I will discuss this later.Jarfredir's desires were plain enough - he wanted a grandchild who would be Jarl of Ygg. "I understand your desire, but there are several things you should be aware of. To begin with, it is likely Petra and I will outlive not only your children, but their grandchildren as well, as our origins are wizardly. The same applies to our children. Barring an accident, Ansharos will still be young and hale long after both you and Gridda are dust..."Jarfredir interrupted, "...So it will cost him little to marry my daughter!" The mores here needed work as much as the technology. The man wanted to sell his daughter as chattel in exchange for an ally and what he thought would be power."That's not the custom of my people. We do not choose spouses for our children - there is no rush, and they have every expectation of having plenty of time to choose and still being able to have and raise children. Another misapprehension you may have: you may believe Ansharos is my heir. In fact, the law of my people is such that he cannot be made my heir until he achieves manhood. A third is that our heirs are not necessarily our oldest son. Catharin may be a better choice - it is up to each of them to apply themselves to be more worthy of it. Even if he is designated heir apparent upon attaining adulthood, that is subject to change if another of our children - or their descendants - becomes a better choice while I live. Finally, to repeat myself, we do not choose matches for our children. Catharin and Ansharos will choose for themselves when they are of age and encounter someone they believe will remain suitable for a very long lifetime.""That's ... reckless! The young don't have the ability to choose wisely!""On the contrary. We have discovered that our wizardly gifts enable us to see the souls of potential matches, and know whether they are suitable. Both Catharin and Ansharos know there's no rush to choose a spouse; in fact I would be surprised if either of them chose before their fiftieth year. How old are you, Jarfredir?" He was thirty-eight. "That's not the point!""That is the easiest part of my point for the non-wizardly to comprehend. You just claimed the young don't have the ability to choose wisely, but want to choose for them at an age significantly less than my children will likely be when they choose. If anything, that would argue for the delay. Understand, neither the lady Petra nor I are opposed to your daughter, if our son decides to pursue that course when he is of age. But the contract will not be made today, and no marriage contract for will be made for Ansharos or Catharin until they are of age and decide to make it. Next subject, would you like to stay a few days to become better acquainted, or are you planning to depart in the morning?" In other words, was he willing to see if we could find common ground on other subjects, or was he going to depart in a huff because his offer couldn't be accepted? Who knows, maybe one of his kids and one of ours might like each other."That isn't the way things are done here, Jarl Alexan!""If it please milord thane," Petra interjected, "My husband is Jarl of Ygg, and therefore that is how it is done in the Jarldom of Ygg. While I would be most pleased to make a good match for one or both of my children, the time is not now. Milord husband has taught me how our wizardly gifts choose for us, more wisely than we know. Neither Catharin nor Ansharos is ready for such a match. If it means I must wait longer for grandchildren, they and my children will be happier and better for it.""I meant what I said, Thane Jarfredir," I continued, "Should such a match develop naturally, over the fullness of time, I would not object. But that time is not now. I would rather be your friend, or at least have goodwill between us. But if your price for that is putting one of my children into a match they're not ready for, it is too steep. If you would develop a possible friendship, you're welcome to stay. Frue Petra does enjoy company, and being hostess. But the subject of my children's marriage is closed until they decide otherwise."He was on the verge of storming off, but his wife stopped him, spoke to him in low tones about patience and accepting what I was willing to offer rather than starting a feud. Smart woman. "I shall be pleased to accept your offer and Frue Petra's company, milord Jarl. Perhaps our children shall become friends""You are most welcome," I told her, "Now, if you will excuse me, the disturbance earlier did some damage. I must discuss the hiring of some workmen with my steward." Ioen was perfectly capable of handling the contract for repairs, therefore he was the best one to do it, leaving me free to do what only I could.Copyright 2024 Dan Melson. All rights reserved.

[image error]Amazon link here Books2Read retailers hereIt was hard to believe she was gone.For over an Earth century, Sephia had been the commander of Bolthole Base. She'd been the one constant, unchangeable thing about the mission on Calmena. The base was four times the size it had been when I started, Calmena itself was utterly changed, but Sephia was changeless - until this morning. She'd had a cerebral hemorrhage at some point overnight and died in her sleep. Her bright blue eyes were forever closed and I could have used a shot of her no-nonsense grandmotherly attitude. But her body had already been fed back into the converter as per standard Imperial procedure; she was one with the universe now.Section Private Kryphan was senior-most of those in the line of command; therefore he was interim commander. It was unlikely a successor for Sephia would be more than two days in coming - today's courier run would have taken the news to Earth, almost certainly the new base commander would arrive tomorrow. But whoever it was, they'd never replace the grandmother hen who'd watched over us for the last century, kept us focused on the task, held us together through all the setbacks, and kicked us into action when it was necessary.It had been pointless to Portal back to Bolthole Base, but every single one of the twentytwo teams currently working the Advancement Mission nonetheless made the journey, each of us making a solemn pilgrimage to the door of the base commander's office that had been hers for so long, just standing at the door looking in in silent farewell, bore executing tatzen, the Imperial gesture of respect, before turning and walking away silently. Tatzen was a variable gesture. Fingertips to chin was respect. Fingertips to upper lip was more. Nose to the joining of the ring and middle fingers was the limit of ordinary. Nose to wrist and palm to heart was all that and love and loss and you couldn't get any higher. Anything more than that was simple pretension, and none of us would do that to her. Sephia's absence was a burning hole in all of our hearts. She hadn't had to do anything beyond her job as commander of Bolthole Base, but she'd done everything she could to make our jobs easier as well. She would be missed.Both Asina and I had last messages from her in our datalink queue. Likely a last farewell and whatever last message she'd wanted us to be reminded of. We'd play them back in Yalskarr. Speaking of which, we'd be missed if we lingered more than a few minutes. Sephia was gone, and not coming back, but we still had our work to do. After a quick chat with Arrel and Dildre, we portaled back to the Calmenan city that had been our home for over sixty Imperial years now.Yalskarr was a different place, sixty Imperial years on. It had been a port town when we arrived; now it was one of the busiest ports on Calmena as well as an industrial center rivaling anything Earth had had in the mid-twentieth century. Nearly a million people lived in the city itself and another four in the territory it governed, which included the oilfields to the north as well as enough farmland to feed them all. It had its growing pains but Asina as First Captain had done her best to help the area remain livable as well as defensible from demonic incursions. She was retired from that now but still consulted from time to time; administering the industrial conglomerate that built ships, airplanes, and automobiles as well as the engines to power all of them took all of her time while I worked on advancing the technology as fast as I could, largely using the blueprints from Earth's Industrial Age. The time was coming when the lives of every human on Calmena would hinge on how fast we could upgrade.From the little copy of the Bleriot monoplane that had begun aviation here, Calmena's aircraft industry was ready to transition into the jet age, but that was far from an unmixed blessing. For most of the things that would be needed in repelling large bodies of demonic troops, propeller driven aircraft were more effective. Jets were expensive; the only real need for jet fighters was fighting other jet fighters and I couldn't see the demons fielding fighters that something of that era could fight. Either the demons would copy something like an Imperial Starbird in which case jets would simply be expensive targets, or they wouldn't bother at all, in which case Calmenan jet fighters would be wasting resources that could more profitably be used elsewhere. But it was difficult to explain this to people who'd never been allowed to see Imperial starships and thought jets were the pinnacle of development.Fortunately, most of the military organizations of Calmena understood who their real enemies were. Thousands of years of oppression and regular waves of demonic legions attempting to reconquer human nations made that abundantly clear. Over on Wilmarglr Continent where we'd started, Bazhen had imperial aspirations but fortunately the demons kept graphically explaining the folly of attacking fellow humans when there were demons trying to eat both them and their intended conquests.Asina and I each had half an hour of putting out those routine little metaphorical fires that seem to sprout like magic when the boss is away even momentarily. Hers had to do with the supply of metals - both iron and aluminum - that our shipyards and plane assembly required in thousand ton lots. Taman, her assistant, was a good accountant who couldn't be told we had access to more wealth than was apparent, and had tried to scale back or split an order of metal we needed immediately if not sooner. Mine had to do with a design issue on the proposed gunships. Makis understood why the main firepower had to sprout to one side, but Ghent, our liaison, was a former fighter pilot who wanted it all firing forward and tried to coerce a design change from him. I explained to Ghent for the seventeenth time that transports could keep one wing and therefore the guns aligned with it pointed at a target indefinitely, a feature that couldn't be replicated for any forward firing weapons. Ghent may have had experience using fighters to strafe demonic legions; I had access to records from an Earth he didn't know existed, and from the Empire as well, although Imperial tech was tens of thousands of years past anything Calmena could produce. We looted technology from pre-contact Earth because there was no living memory of Imperial equivalents and few designs for their production. The Swass-class transports that were the basic design were an almost exact copy of an Earth transport plane called a C-130 Hercules, and the gunships based upon them had been known as Spectres. I'd been told the new guns for them would be every bit as effective as the original Spectre.Once the metaphorical brushfires were out, we retired to Asina's office to play Sephia's message on our datalinks. The basic message was what we'd expected - how Calmena was important to the upcoming war, how we were going to make an outsize difference to the outcome, how she knew we'd make her proud. The basic message was one she'd repeated over and over again in our time on Calmena, but it brought tears to our eyes hearing it from her mouth one more time, and we loved her for it. Her straight pale blonde pageboy cut was slightly longer than the last time we'd seen her - it wasn't a recent recording. We checked the timestamp and it was almost ten years old. Asina had loved Sephia as a replacement for the mother she'd lost as a child. I wasn't an orphan, but she'd become a beloved aunt, equal in my affections with Tia Esperanza and Tia Luz and Tia Grace. I made a point of copying the message to archive; I wanted to be able to play this message again someday, a cherished memory of a dear friend.The message had an update - numbered twelve. Evidently one through eleven had been deleted. It was short and to the point. The Sephia in this message looked a little thinner, her hair a little shorter, and her face more determined. She spoke straight into the screen, bright blue eyes blazing defiance. "Joe, Asina, and the rest of you. They don't want me to tell you yet, but if you're seeing this, I'm beyond any discipline they might impose. Believe me when I tell you that right now your most important concern is ammunition for the weapons you have. Make what use of this information you can."The timestamp was three days old.Copyright 2021 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.

[image error]Amazon purchase link Books2Read retailers hereOur first destination was Bolthole Base, high up in the most inaccessible area of the Collision Range on Wimarglr Continent. A lot of work went into keeping natives from realizing it was there, from holographic projectors to avoidance fields and forbiddings with auros. In the long run, they'd find it, but the general thinking was the long-awaited rematch between the fractal demons and the Empire would be underway before then, rendering it a moot point.There's a moment on approach when you make a mental shift from thinking you're in space getting closer to the planet to thinking you're on the planet even though you're not on the ground yet. For me, it's when I start being able to make out individual features in the video feed. The nameless mountain in which Bolthole Base was embedded was usually it, followed by the small alpine meadow below the base. The mountain itself - second highest peak on the planet - was perpetually ice crowned, even though it was no higher than Mount Whitney in California and within a couple degrees of the planetary equator. There wasn't time in Calmena's short year of 145 Earth days (136 Imperial or local) for the snow that fell to melt. The lake below waxed and waned with the weather.The pilot picked up the approach path, and slowing still further apparently headed straight towards the side of the mountain. At the last moment, the illusion of solidity melted and the viewscreen showed a massive cavern holding fifty or sixty Starbirds and cutters. The base and the cavern holding it had expanded in the time I'd been here, but it was still too small for anything bigger than cutters to land.The base commander, Sephia, was waiting to greet us. Sephia looked like a blonde college coed of my youth, her white-blonde pageboy cut barely ruffling in the sheltered cavern. "Welcome back, my young friends!" she greeted the two of us. As soon as she opened her mouth, her attitude and manner of speaking betrayed the fact that she was old for a natural state human - perhaps a full square by now. I didn't know exactly - what I did know was she'd held a higher rank than she did now at the end of the Reunification, three thousand Imperial years ago. Except for occasional leave, she'd been base commander for over an Earth century now, and she had no intention of applying for promotion. "This is where the next war with the demons will start," she'd told me when I first arrived. Taking a promotion would mean leaving Calmena for her."Good to see you, grandmother!" I teased her in return. I was aware the base was busier than it had been in times past. There were more troops visible in the main cavern. I wasn't sure why; it wasn't any of my business. I could ask if I wanted, but I was certain Sephia wouldn't give me a straight answer. The Empire has a habit of keeping operational information to those with a need to know, Asina concurred. I wasn't aware that the combat soldiers were doing any more work but there had to be a reason the Empire had done it. Likely it had to do with the heightened sense that open war with the fractal demons was close. I'd heard rumors of more troops being assigned to Earth as well."Staying the night, or just heading on through?" she asked."The plan is to take the portal to Tabbraz immediately," Asina responded, "But there's no rush. If you'd like us to stay for some reason, there are ships heading to Yalskarr from there all the time." Tabbraz was on the south coast of Hashiboor, from which passage on a steamship to Yalskarr, at the base of the Karnel Peninsula, would take a few days. We had to be a little more circumspect these days. Rather than just walking out of a portal or setting up a compound in the middle of nowhere, we had to leave something of an arrival trail and something of a departure trail. Calmena was getting civilized. Somebody might ask where we came from - it was important for them to be able to find something of a trail.Copyright 2019 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved

[image error]Amazon purchase link Books2Read retailers purchase linksThe forges of N'yeschlass began their beat at dawn, every day without fail. Things had changed since we began.The town had never been officially named. The name had grown from the unofficial motto of what my wife and I and the original group of refugees cowering in the jungle had begun not quite twenty Imperial years ago. The demonic tongue of Calmena had no word for freedom. N'yeschlass translated literally as "no slaves." It was a promise to all - come to us and be free. It didn't appeal to everyone, as it included freedom to fail and freedom to starve, but those were simply the terms of life everywhere on Calmena. In the portions run by the fractal demons, slaves were eaten when they began to show signs of aging. Where the pseudo-feudal human agaani held sway, grinding poverty and recurrent famines were almost as brutal. Only in N'yeschlass and its confederated territory was there a significant chance of a human being alive on what an Earther like me would consider their fiftieth birthday.I still worked my smithy a couple hours per day. It had seen upgrades since the day we'd built it - it was probably the equal of a mid-19th century forge on Earth now. But these days, the metal was mined out of the Collision Range and I didn't have to pretend to cart it in while pulling most of it out of a converter. We still had the secret room with all the technological conveniences underneath our forge, but these days I bought all of the metal I used. I might create the gold and silver I used to buy it out of the converter, but the metal I actually worked was honestly mined by miners who were part of our new nation. N'yeschlass the nation held better than a third of Wimarglr, the North America sized continent we'd called Continent One when we discovered Calmena, including most of the Collision Range.There were probably twentyfive square people in N'yeschlass the city these days. After better than twenty years of thinking alternatively in demonic and Imperial systems, the former for everyday interactions with Calmenans and the latter for reports and planning to our Imperial sponsors, the decimal system and all the other standards of measurement I'd grown up with on Earth was almost alien to me now. 90,000 was a fair number of people for a city to have with this level of technology, and N'yeschlass the nation probably had four or five cities that were bigger now. N'yeschlass the city was the gateway to the mining regions in the Collision Range, a name that had stuck when I'd used it inadvertently in conversation with a Calmena native. "Collision" didn't mean anything in demonic; they just thought it was a good name. Probably half the place names on Earth came from circumstances not too different.N'yeschlass the city had a very European feel to it. I don't mean the architecture was similar, it wasn't. That looked like nothing in my experience. By any reasonable definition, construction here was mostly wooden squalor. But the streets had grown organically rather than planned. Asina and I still owned a good bit of land, but these days most of it was in use. I spent more time managing others than working metal myself. The city was where more metal was smelted than anywhere else on Calmena. Iron, nickel, copper, tin, lead and even small amounts of aluminum and others. N'yeschlass' metallurgy was probably late eighteenth century equivalent on average. Not bad. Asina and I owned a good bit of the production, and had shown everyone else how to do it.Copyright 2017 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved

[image error]Amazon purchase link and Books2Read retailersImperial vehicles were more like this ship: quiet, and almost too powerful. Thirty meters from nose to tail, roughly twenty six from wingtip to wingtip, with the central cylinder being roughly eight meters in diameter, Golden Hind was reminiscent of one of NASA's old space shuttles. It had the same type of outer hull, minus the rocket nozzles - it was powered by a main siphon that could provide about ten percent of the power of the sun, essentially forever. A converter was attached that could use that power to produce matter in most configurations from machine tools to food. Impellers were capable of about 1200 gravities of acceleration in normal space - from grounded to 99% of light speed in less than seven hours. The Vistula Space Corporation, or VSC, had ordered a standard transport cutter, with a time-jammer addition. The faster-than-light time-jammer was designed and rated for over two hundred thousand times the speed of light. That meant Earth to Barnard's Star in about fifteen minutes at top speed - which would be like traveling to the corner store at Mach speeds. It even had a Vector Drive in case an operant pilot became available. One person could operate Golden Hind, but we had a crew of five.The titular commander was John Dulles. I wasn't privy to why VSC had named a corporate vice-president to command the ship. I didn't think it was a good idea, but nobody asked me. Earth MBAs didn't have the background I thought likely to make good decisions in that sort of situation. I thought that if he had any brains he'd pretend to think it over and do what Major John Kyle (newly mustered out from U.S.A.F.) - our pilot - suggested. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and former fighter pilot, Major Kyle at least had the kinds of training to understand what was important if we got into trouble. Jayden Smith - a graduate of Johns Hopkins with a decade of solid work in molecular biology with medical application - was our biologist, and William Miyazaki was our astronomer. Will had had a doctorate from CalTech before his twenty-first birthday, and had spent the ten years since expanding Earth's infant science of detecting habitable planets at interstellar distances - technology that had become irrelevant overnight when the Empire arrived to save us from ourselves.What was I doing here? Well, the family had more than enough people to work the dog business, even the shipborne part involving Tia Grace's two huge spherical transport ships, Earth and Indra. Her husband's family had given them to her to help grow the dog business, and she'd needed cargo handlers, for which she wanted family - me and all the rest of her nephews and nieces. She'd given us datalinks so we could interface with Imperial computers just by thinking, plus they gave us a lot of other capabilities. Think of a datalink essentially like having a tiny super smartphone right there in your brain. Then she'd left us alone on her ships for a week at a time, with nothing to do except work and study. Of course the first things we all learned were the rest of the skills of Imperial space crew. Everything from in-system pilot to power engineer. Which made us pretty unique on Earth after the unification. When a couple Earth consortia got the funds for small spacecraft, the first thing they did was offer an unbelievable amount recruiting us, as the only Earth people with working knowledge of Imperial spacecraft. I had a better understanding of the Imperial technology we were using than almost anyone else. I was engineer, repairman, janitor, and back-up for everyone else. If something broke, I was pretty much the only hope of fixing it. Finally, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, the Empire essentially required that the command pilot be someone who had passed the Imperial adulthood tests, not just a temporary adult-by-courtesy. That meant I had final authority as far as the ship itself was concerned - I could over-ride anyone and everyone else if I had to. However, I'd get a bonus if I didn't reveal it - VSC's financial backers were Earth business people, steeped in the business traditions of Earth. They didn't want to tell successful professionals with a decade or more experience that the ultimate boss was a twenty-two year old kid who had been working his way through community college a little over year ago. Our family had had over a year to deal with those tests; it had only been about eight weeks since the Imperial arrival notified everyone else.Some people might gripe about no women on the crew. Cramped living quarters meant we were living in bunk beds about six feet by three with about eighteen inches of vertical space and absolutely no privacy, so Golden Hind had an all-male crew. The offsetting reality was that my cousin Adela was aboard all-female Victoria, headed off towards Alpha Centauri and other stars in that direction. We were supposed to be gone for five to seven days each, each returning in plenty of time for our next turn onboard Tia Grace's ships. That was in fact written into my contract - replacement for wages lost if the ship went past nominal return date.There had been a lot of interest in us, as if in disbelief that the Empire was really going to let Earth people pilot interstellar ships with no oversight from its own people, less than two months after taking over the planet. I don't know about no oversight, but as long as we stayed within the framework that had been pounded out over the millennia, there wasn't any reason to treat Earth humans as different from any other citizens of the Empire. Golden Hind and Victoria had responsible, qualified adults in charge, so the Empire was fine with VSC's two new interstellar craft. VSC had had a departure ceremony, with speeches by half a dozen people who would have been Very Important Politicians just a couple months before, including the President of the United States and our very own self-appointed luminary Mr. Dulles. Everyone from both crews had less than complimentary pet names for that clown. He talked of the glories of exploration and bringing back treasures. Idiot. Mines, even "pick the pure, no refinery needed stuff up off the ground"-type mines would never compete with siphons and converters. We were looking for livable planets, or planets that could be made livable. Nothing else.Our actual departure from Earth had been pretty prosaic. We'd used the old runway the shuttles used to land on in Cape Canaveral, for no good reason. Imperial ships could take off vertically and safely from anywhere, with noise about equal to an electric car until you hit Mach. Major Kyle took us up and out of the atmosphere, then out of the plane of the ecliptic preparatory to transitioning to light speed. It wasn't far as in-system distances went, and it really only took about half an hour to get well clear of most of the junk in the solar system. We watched Earth drop away, becoming a blue-white marble behind us before diminishing to a point. We hadn't used maximum acceleration, so we were only about ten million kilometers from Earth - twenty times further than any previous ship manned by Earth humans - when we engaged the time-jammer and went superluminal.The aforementioned capture buffer built quickly. It didn't matter if we caught a photon that had left Sol before us, or one traveling towards us from one of the stars in the "forward" half of the sky. Photons impacting the bubble entered the capture buffer, and only slowly worked their way loose, resulting in the pretty soft pastels I talked about earlier. We started off slow and built speed up over the course of an hour or so. It had been planned that we'd peak at about fifty thousand times the speed of light, but Major Kyle ended up ramping more slowly to a lower top speed, about thirty thousand times the speed of light, which we stayed at for about an hour and a half before it was time to start slowing down again. During that time he jogged us three times to miss objects large enough to worry about. A couple of times, Dulles tried to talk to him but Major Kyle said, "If you want to talk, we need to stop first." It wasn't exactly difficult piloting, but you couldn't let your attention wander at all. In one second at thirty thousand times the speed of light, we were traveling about nine billion kilometers, or roughly the entire diameter of Neptune's orbit. There were a lot of reasons why Vector Drive was better, if you had the pilot to handle it. For one thing, when you went directly from point A to point B, there was a lot less to hit.Copyright 2016 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.

Connected Worlds is an intentional riff on Zelazny's Amber, Michael Moorcock's Tanelorn, Brian Daley's Cinnabar, and others. It is the setting for my current primary work in progress, working title "Bubbles Of Creation" It's been several years since I worked in the setting, so I'll describe it for you. The first book is "The Fountains of Aescalon" (Amazon link here and Books2Read link here). The second book is "The Monad Trap" (Amazon link here, Books2Read retailer link here)"Fountains Of Aescalon" is both about exploring the Connected Worlds and an accidental romance. The character of Petra was inspired by Circe from the Odyssey, a demigoddess cursed to seduce and punish men suspected of infidelity. She was intended to be a short term foil to Alexan; instead she stood up and insisted that she had a better plan, and she was right.Alexan is a complex character. His origin is in the Empire of Humanity, before the Ston Rebellion and Interregnum. It wouldn't be wrong to think of him as a ghost - he began as a splinter, in a time when the Fifteen Families were just beginning to discover splinters and their uses. Once he sorts out who he really is, he knows he cannot stay in the Empire, and his destination is suggested by an ally.Alexan is a difficult character to write (progress has been slow, but the idea has a hold on me). It's difficult to create opposition of such a nature as to constitute a credible threat to him, but reviews tell me I've done well on that score in the first two novels. "Bubbles of Creation" will likely be the last Alexan story (although I thought "The Monad Trap" would be the last until I had this idea); I have at least one other idea centering on a different character (tentatively titled "The Crazy Lady"), and there is no reason I cannot write as many other stories of the Connected Worlds as I want."The Monad Trap" is a story partially about Alexan's self-imposed quest to learn more about Aescalon and environs, and to advance himself and others in the process, and partially about attempts for revenge upon him from beyond the grave.Aescalon is a small place at the very center of existence. It consists of a cavern on the order of 25 miles (40km) in diameter, with what *appears* to be a neutron star at the center of it. Near the surface of the cavern are 165 First Order Connected Realms (165 is the number of combinations you get when you take 11 dimensions chosen 3 at a time). These are full on universes; the majority of the first story is spent in Migurd, one of the first order Connected Realms which has a pseudo-nordic air crossed with something resembling Arthurian legend, but it's an entire world all by itself and we barely scratch the surface of Migurd in the first book.There are roughly 20 million Second Order Connected Realms, and even larger numbers of Third and Fourth Order Connected Realms. They are progressively smaller, however.There is a massive and unparalleled power source centered on Aescalon. Deities and other extraordinary entities are drawn to it - as are those who wish to *become* deities, and as Alexan discovers, there are multiple ranks of deity. However, each and every deity must have a 'divine curse', something that constrains their behavior in a way as to defy volition, at least in that regard. There is also at least one trap for the ambitious but unwary along the way to climbing the divine ranks.

One thing I should try and make clear to you, the reader, is what my author's brand is about.First and foremost, I want to entertain you. I will happily give up everything else in order to entertain. If you don't come away from the book with a sense of "That was fun!" and wanting to read the next book, I've failed. I am trying to entertain you, and if I don't do that, you shouldn't give me any more of your money. Since I want you to buy more of my books and tell your friends I'm an entertaining writer, I'm going to try to entertain you. I don't try to have flippant smart-asses tossing off one-liners every ten seconds, but I do try to slide a few in where appropriate.The 'flavor' of science fiction I'm writing is a blend of Golden Age and modern 'human wave'. People are at the center of what I write. Technology may dictate some of the constraints of whatever the protagonists are trying to solve, but humans are in control, not robots or machinery - and people sometimes figure out ways around constraints, whether technical or political.Second, I want the characters to think. I want you to come away from the book thinking that everyone did what they did for rational reasons or at least motivations real people have. Nobody in my books is evil because it says so on their character card. The antagonists are pursuing their own best interests as best they see them. Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Similarly, I try really hard to avoid violations of the Evil Overlord's Principles (This should illustrate what I'm talking about if you need explanation). If it were possible to game the antagonist with a cheap shot, someone would already have done it. I want you to have the feeling that it took some real thought to plot this story - that all the characters all thought and worked for their chosen ends, and that the resolution reflects this. Nor do I ask you to swallow patent absurdities because it somehow enables a 'Cool Idea'. Cool Ideas should fit within the established framework of how people behave and the world I've built.Third, I want the ending to be something good that the characters have earned. I'm not going to promise that they all live to get there, but all that work and risk should earn them a better place than they started from according to what they value. I'm also not going to promise it's the place they thought they were going in the first place. But if the work and risk wasn't going to earn them a better place, why should they bother? Even if it's just saving other people from a disaster, the characters should get something out of it. The ones who survive and persevere, anyway.Fourth and finally, I'd like to think that I maybe gave you a little bit of a different way to think about things. I'm not looking to preach at you like a tenured professor, I just want to illustrate that there are different ways of looking at the same issue. I don't think I'm going to change your mind. But maybe - just maybe - I can induce you to have a thoughtful conversation with someone who doesn't agree with you. There's far too little of that these days.

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I announced myself to Helene and she invited me into her studio. She was working on a voice project for someone else that day; she put it aside and sat with me. "The first question I have to ask, Grace, is how territorial you are about the dog business?""If it would get me the people I need to help Earth, I'd sell the dog farm tomorrow. I can make more running cargo around the Empire than I can in the dog business, and be home every night.""Well, perhaps you ought to do precisely that. My husband has a pair of older size two capital ships that really aren't economical any longer. They've been sitting in a holding yard for years. You should be able to put Interstitials in, maybe even pay an on-board cargo handler. Agree to rent space in the hold to anyone who wants. Class two capital ships have external racks for nine small cruiser auxiliaries, as well as internal space for smaller craft. Inoperants can make sublight runs within the system on impellers. If you simply hold your fees to something the consortium can pay, that would solve most of the problems.""That seems like it might have merit, but the real point is to get strong Guardians who can fight demons. My satellite has found a jopas, two spraxos, and several nephraim, none of which I'm confident of facing alone.""Not all operants are Vector pilots, let alone Interstitial pilots.""I know, Helene, but how many will be interested in Earth?""All you can do is ask." True. Without the Empire behind it, this whole thing was purely voluntary. On the other hand, I didn't have to choose by the method of taking the first eight people - or eighty - who ask. I could explicitly reserve slots for operants willing to fight major demons. Class two capital ships might have been small by the standards of current commerce, but they were over three hundred fifty meters in radius - nearly one hundred million cubic meters of which was cargo capacity. By comparison, the largest cargo ships on Earth are around seven to eight hundred thousand cubic meters. I wasn't certain every stray dog and cat on Earth would fill a hundred million cubic meters. On the other hand, with an internal system for moving stasis boxes, it would make it easy for dog people to bring back a stasis box at a time, and each participant could have boxes and hold volumes marked for their individual use. "Is anyone likely to volunteer just for a demon hunt?""I'd say it's likely. There's a lot of bad feeling towards demons over their part in the Interregnum. If I wasn't raising two small children, I might volunteer myself."That was a shock. Helene was the embodiment of a dignified lady artist. Then I remembered Anara telling me how she used to have two other children, and I realized I didn't know how many other close friends and family she might have lost. Figure every Imperial citizen old enough to have lived through the Interregnum was a good candidate to volunteer, and that included a large proportion of the strongest as well as all of the most experienced Guardians. For the first time, I really understood that learning about history second-hand was a poor substitute for the experience of those who lived through it. "What if I were to simply upload my satellite log?""You might have to promote it a bit, and add a location. Perhaps you might have to promise transportation. But the response that would surprise me the least is veterans of the era start recruiting on their own. Everyone lost people they cared about. I was extraordinarily lucky in that I, my husband, and four of my six children survived. By comparison the Baryan lost twenty out of twentytwo adult members and all of their children and spouses, the M'Dorna lost fourteen out of fifteen adults and all their children and spouses, and depending upon your interpretation, ten or eleven of the Great Houses were completely exterminated. The Council actually had a survival rate greater than the Imperial population at large. More than half of all Imperial planets were completely destroyed or sterilized, none kept even half their old population alive. Nobody got through the Interregnum unscathed, and the demons were the enabling factor. Most survivors of the Interregnum don't think we've done anything like even the scales yet. Many will drop anything they can to give them a chance at demons.""So a two prong strategy, one to recruit volunteers for an assault, one to recruit fellow dog sellers. What is the advantage of the other dog sellers?""One person, isolated as you are on Earth, is a lot easier to kill than an ongoing presence. Even if you're the only pilot for the consortium, the other members will have someone who checks on them if they don't return."So if there were a dozen of us on Earth, killing one of us didn't help them. With Asto behind me, it wouldn't help them even if I was alone, but they'd know it wouldn't help them if I wasn't alone. "Thank you Helene. Am I going to be able to thank Scimtar in person this evening?" She communicated no, so I continued, "Please also tell him thank you for me?" and started to take my leave, but she interrupted me."One more thing, Grace. My husband said it's time you had a refresher. I've made reservation for you with the family arms people tomorrow from nineteen zero to twentysix."Well, dang. I had had plans for tomorrow - it was the only day I'd get in the Empire before I had to head back to Earth. A day and a half here was roughly six days there. Neither she nor grandfather can force you, love, Asto sent, but it really would be a good idea. The skills decay without use. So I agreed, and then took my leave.Copyright 2014 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.