War Child

by Scott Michael Decker

(Spoiler Alert) In her penultimate battle to conquer the galactic core, a near-term Mitsubi princess is betrayed and defeated by her Iberian foes. Her daughter of mixed extraction is taken from her body and reared in the Iberian Empire, her name Serena. Twenty years later, her parentage unbeknownst to her, Serena attends a Nahuatl university, where the Iberia prince, also a student, becomes enamored of her. The Mitsubi Empire, foundering since the betrayal and death of its eldest princess, cedes yet more territory to its Aztec rival to the west in an elaborate, contentious ceremony. Attempting to stir up trouble, a Japanese admiral orders the Spanish prince kidnapped from the Nahuatl university, while unbeknownst to him, his colleague, a general, orders the killing of an Iberian citizen at that same campus—Serena. Trained in stealth and poison, she evades then kills the assassin but her roommate is injured; her roommate confesses she is Serena's guard, and begs her to escape. Serena slips away to the spaceport, where she sees an oblong box being surreptitiously loaded onto a starliner. As her yacht takes off on autopilot, she learns of the prince's kidnapping, and commandeers her yacht to go after the starliner. She steals aboard the starliner, kills his kidnappers, and smuggles him onto her yacht. She swears him to secrecy and leaves him in Iberian territory on an isolated moon, then takes the yacht and disappears, aghast at what she has become. Six years later, Serena is now a Buddhist priestess near a major Mitsubi port and works as an engine mechanic at the shipyards, mastering the Zen of Starship Engine Maintenance. A yacht is brought in for her to repair—the same yacht Serena abandoned five years ago, and she realizes she can no longer run from her fate. But even as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her origins, multiple attempts are made on her life. The young woman continues to defy those who would use her toward their own ends in her battle to discover who she really is. Her search for her identity takes her to the heart of the Mitsubi Empire and toward her mother's betrayor.

Hardcover

First published July 28, 2014

About the author

Scott Michael Decker, MSW, is an author by avocation and a social worker by trade. He is the author of twenty-plus novels in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, dabbling among the sub-genres of space opera, biopunk, spy-fi, and sword and sorcery. His biggest fantasy is wishing he were published. His fifteen years of experience working with high-risk populations is relieved only by his incisive humor. Formerly interested in engineering, he's now tilting at the windmills he once aspired to build. Asked about the MSW after his name, the author is adamant it stands for Masters in Social Work, and not "Municipal Solid Waste," which he spreads pretty thick as well. His favorite quote goes, "Scott is a social work novelist, who never had time for a life" (apologies to Billy Joel). He lives and dreams happily with his wife near Sacramento, California.