Nano Windup: Not Really a Spoiler =oD

Epilogue

Ass Pocket was too damaged to make the trip. He thought he might risk it anyway, but the Federal decree said that all ships damaged in the battle would be repaired and provisioned at station’s expense. Dell had dumped the old man while the Coordinator was piloting the heap, so he figured he might even be able to make a profit on it.

It didn't hurt to have a little something extra to compensate for lost time, especially if they had caused him to miss his appointment and his proper pay.

Dell took the time to get himself as “clean” as this grimy tub could manage. If he was going to be stuck here while they spruced up the ship he might as well enjoy the amenities. It didn't pay to be careless, but he’d earned a little recreation. When the ship docked he was waiting for seals to set so he could open the ramp.

It came down on a surprise. He watched the opening widen on someone standing just outside, waiting for him. He’d thought that might happen, but had been prepared for armed MP’s, not a curvy little dollie.

She was small. He liked small. He looked her over and approved of everything he saw, from the high spike heels that tightened her calves and thighs and turned her buttocks just so, to the close fitting semi-sheer dress that showed how slender she was, the firm torso, each curve of the small breasts that she covered with socially polite modestly but no shame. Her hair was long and pristine white, done up behind her head in a neat braid for a hand’s width before being bound and then left free from there downwards. Her smile was friendly, the way really good prostitutes could look at you as if you were a long lost love in town for a night, rather than a mark with cash in his pocket.

He took the time to appreciate all the scenery before making eye contact. She stood and let him look her over, smiled a little more warmly. When he looked into her lovely silver eyes she lowered her handbag and gave him a welcoming nod. Dell wondered what sort of deliciously naughty goodies might be in the bag.

“Mer Borimen?” She waited only a moment. When he didn't respond, she proceeded.

“I believe you have some outstanding payment for services rendered. I’m here to make an installment.”

That smile again.

To hell with leaving the ship.

“Come on in,” he said, moving aside to make room. She walked up the ramp, every step displaying strength and grace and flexibility, and Dell couldn't help but grin a little. “You know, I thought I might not get paid.”

She stopped next to him and stood very close, so that he could smell the subtle perfume she was wearing. He swallowed. It had been a long time since he’d seen a woman quite so enticing, even a doll.

“Mer Borimen,” she breathed, sliding a hand up his chest and around behind his head, fingernails drawing tingles up the back of his scalp. “I intend to make sure you get your due.”

She slid the other hand up his chest on the other side, and he started to make a comment, but she put a finger to his lip, then took hold of his jaw as she leaned in, her nipples pressing against him as she whispered.

“Consider this an installment from the Hydran Delegation.”

He had a moment to frown in confusion before she snapped his neck.

Excerpt from Alibies by Sabrina

The phone lay in the middle of the floor, dial tone long since gone. Emma picked it up from the floor and stared at it a moment, then replaced it on it’s base. Probably out of charge and useless now. She turned away, planning on a quick trip to her room and to bed. It was past midnight and she didn’t want to deal with it anymore, “it” being Adrienne’s miscarriage, her husband’s dickheadedness, her own hallucinations, as Stacy suggested Hodges might be, and especially not Home Guard. If she could get past Hodges’ room without too nasty an encounter, she’d fall onto the covers and sleep, sleep, sleep until sunlight through the blinds woke her. Or not. Maybe she’d sleep through the day or even the week. She could dream, anyway.

The phone rang behind her. Emma stopped, surprised. She’d been sure there’d be no charge left.

The caller ID showed “caller unknown,” so she touched the red mute button.

When she checked, the charge indicator showed zero. Broken maybe. Like so many things.

Emma shook her head. Melodrama wasn’t something she indulged in often. Tonight it colored every thought.
She’d reached the soft carpet of the hall when the phone rang yet again. Louder than before, which wasn’t possible since she was farther away than when it rang the first time. Ridiculous, really. She didn’t quite run back across the space between herself and the phone, but she hustled.

The phone quit as soon as she reached the high table where it sat. “Unknown” stuttered and blinked at her on the little screen, as if struggling through low battery life. Throwing the thing across the room might be a lot of fun but not terribly smart. Clutching your purse to your side because you didn’t want to be parted from the gun inside was a pretty clear indication she needed a working phone. She did have her cell though.

Emma reconsidered throwing the handset, then set it back in the cradle. Stacy’s talk stayed with her, not because the woman had offered anything so amazingly astute, but for the talk itself. If Emma saw Hodges in every sunset and dealt with his ghost every night, that indicated she hadn’t finished dealing with her grief. It wasn’t quite what Stacy had said, but what Emma took away from their conversation.

“Hodges, if you’re doing this, I’d like you to stop. I’ve had a really rough day and I need to go to bed. Okay?”

No answer save silence.

The sillies struck and Emma offered a bad movie imitation. “Well, um, okay then, I’m just gonna have to go ahead and ask you to come back another time...”

The phone rang again, jangling until the entire contraption shook from base to handset. Emma eeped and clutched her purse tighter, going so far as to reach inside, as if a .38 might be of any use against a deranged phone. Clutching the gun, she stared at the phone as if expecting it to jump off the base and skitter across the floor after her.

No such thing happened. It just wouldn’t stop ringing. It seemed to grow exponentially louder until all that existed within the house was what was historically the most obnoxious sound in the world.

Emma gathered her courage and strode to the phone. She stopped a stride short of being able to pick it up and leaned in to read who was calling, expecting “unknown” again.

It said, “No.”

A hand batted the phone off its base. It was her own. She could tell because her fingers hurt from the force of the contact. The handset flew free of the base and broke apart on the floor. Emma didn’t even know she was pointing the .38 until the phone quit its ringing. Hands shaking, she kept the gun pointed at the broken pieces of plastic that used to be her phone's handset. When nothing more happened for several long seconds, Emma lowered the gun. As she did, that large, comforting hand she always associated with her husband returned to enfold her. At first her heartbeat magnified beneath that not quite restrictive warmth, then slowed to a regular cadence.

As she relaxed, the warmth and comforting presence of that hand lessened until it was gone. All that was left was Emma.

“Fuck it. It’s getting way too weird around here.”

She pulled her cell and considered. Before she could talk herself out of it, she’d dialed Sean.

Excerpt: Gruesome Darkness

She advanced a step at a time into the swirling mist, her suit AI shifting small lights onto items in the hallways to get a better look at them, categorizing and dismissing them as little or no threat, moving on. Occasionally it marked an item of interest in her HUD: a body, dead; a piece of debris sticking out of a wall at a dangerous angle; a stencil indicating water passages 40m this way, PFC 70m that way.

On her left, a door. Ice spray around the door indicated moist air blown out into the vacuum as the door seal was gradually opened. The AI marked this, and the frozen drag marks across the floor. Jan swung her weapon through the opening and inspected the room beyond.

A small cafeteria. Three bodies, still swelling, twitching. An eye burst while Jan watched, and her rising gorge needled her out of stunned immobility.

Someone had just opened this door, and killed these people by doing so. She swung herself around along the path of the frozen drag marks, off down the hall toward the PFC. She saw a flicker of light and movement in the distance.

“Zoom!” she ordered, and brought her weapon up to sight along it while her vision leapt forward.

“Low light!” The mode shifted to amplification, and her field of view went blurry green, but then resolved.

What was she seeing?

Something had one of the swelling corpses. It was mottled, and hairless, and its bulging teardrop eyes did not reflect her lamps. It turned to her and bared sharp, pointed teeth, and she could see crystals of blood flaking away at the corners of it’s lips.

It didn’t have a suit. It was dragging a writhing, bulging corpse into the lock at the end of the hall.

Jan froze.

A grue?

Every legend of haunted derelicts came back to her at once, and the vacuum-silence and swirling mist in the darkness was suddenly more than she could bear. Stories of corpses stuck in the guns and antennae after a battle, bloating and thrashing and somehow being possessed by some nameless horror from out of the unholy emptiness between the stars, something that had ridden in on a hull and waited for a body, of a hunger for still-warm flesh and blood -

Stop it, Jan! Get hold of yourself! You’re a Federal Marine. That’s madness!

But there it was. She had seen it with her own eyes, pulling a body through a lock to do who knew what to it on the other side.

No. I panicked, misinterpreted what I saw.

“Video playback of the last minute.”

Her HUD opaqued and then replaced the live augmentation feed with the recorded video from sixty seconds ago. She had been advancing, looking down at the floor, up at the wall, left to the doorway, every direction but down the hall where it must have already been dragging the body. She saw the muzzle of the weapon swing into the room, the suit lights play over everything, her HUD marking one, two, three corpses.

“Stop.” She took the time to look at the display citing body temperature as primary evidence, estimating they had been dead for several hours. They were still thrashing and twitching, visibly expanding in the vacuum, but were already dead. It was just decompression. Creepy, but explainable.

She was suddenly overcome by the intolerable feeling that the grue was standing right beside her while her screen was masked. “Visual!”

Her faceplate cleared and she jerked the rifle up, pushing the creature away - but she was alone in the corridor. The skin on her scalp tightened, her flesh prickling all along her back and arms, her stomach rolled, but she was alone. She swallowed.

“Get a grip, Wakelin.” She gripped her rifle, hefted it. She’d almost fired with no target.

She turned around, full circle; she did it again, going the other direction.

“Stop it.” She smelled her own sweat, felt it run down her nose, drip  down her lip so she could taste the salt.

“Current visual inset, 1:6. Continue playback.”

She backed into a corner of the cafeteria so that the little window showed the room in front of her, and her back wasn’t so exposed. She kept looking up, expecting something to drop on her out of the low ceiling, but forced herself to watch the playback.

Her previous viewpoint rotated and followed the icy drag trail back out through the door.

“Now,” she told herself, “we’ll see what this really is.”

The image swung up. Zoomed in. Augmented.

There it was, dragging a body from the room behind. Hairless, skin lumpy and mottled, moving with a limp and shudder. Bulging eyes wide open, but dark, featureless. Mouth open, predator’s pointed canines - too many of them. Flecks of blood still dripping amid a sheen of foam. Swollen tongue darting out and back in again as it stared at her, and kept dragging a body into the tiny rotating lock, cuddling it close so as not to lose any parts in the mechanism.

Exactly as she’d seen it the first time. No suit. No breather. Triggering the lock and disappearing from view.

It had been right there, and had worked the lock.

Her bladder decided this was a good time to use the suit’s evacuation system.

Excerpt: Telepathic Warfare

The armada stopped outside the heliopause to scan the system and plot as safe a final jump into station space as possible. They had intentionally come in under high compression so that the outgoing wave would be slow, allowing the Poetry to jump through and surprise the waiting Fleet with the sudden, unannounced arrival of a hostile rogue telepath. A wing of ships had been assigned to go in with her to run interference, to draw fire and make sure she was able to finish her assigned tasks and perhaps get away to be used again later.

She braced for the nasty ride that was sure to result from the push through their expanding compression wave, and telepathically gave the order to go. Fifteen ships engaged their engines and pushed for station space amid the swarming forces of Fleet at high fold.

Two of them wormholed on entry, scattering absurd energy cones ahead at the station from the local ships that they’d spliced. The other dozen ships in the assault force completely disengaged their compression systems and came in at full throttle under vectored thrust only, riding in behind the compression wave released by their unannounced arrival and targeting anything that wasn’t already exploding with every weapon available. Guns blazing, broadcasting missiles as fast as they could be loaded and fired, a dozen vessels attacked the fleet as a kamikaze strike force trying with all their suicidal focus to draw attention to themselves and do as much damage as possible.

Behind them in the Poetry she waited, concentrating on being innocuous. Don’t notice me. See what a threat those other ships are? Make sure they don’t hit you. They are crazy, dangerous. You should avoid them. Someone else will kill them soon. Just get out of the way. Move aside, dodge, hide, flee...

Nothing worked like playing on the basic fight-or-flight reflex of humans, and flight was always a good option for humans already tired of fighting. Just get a little closer...

Move aside, flee; distance yourself from the Dominion's battles; be safe.

So far no one was shooting at Poetry. Push a little harder - move them toward rebellion.

Fleet has failed to keep you safe. Go it on your own. Leave them behind. Stop giving them your lives and livelihoods.

Go home. Your worlds don’t need them. They take and take, your wealth, your youth, your choice!

She gripped the rail and gritted her teeth, pouring out her will in a whitewash of shifted priority.

Take care of yourself and your own people first!

She felt them respond. No one wanted to fight any more.

The telepathy reached Reese before the signals declaring targets, before the reports of the compression wave, before even Warner’s sudden alarm.

Move aside, flee; distance yourself from the Dominion's battles; be safe.

He received. His supernaturally receptive mind opened and took in, embraced and amplified and absorbed her transmitted power, and it rooted in his basic primal dichotomies and triggered the intended response. He withdrew, balled into himself and hid from the universe. Reese was out of the fight.

His squad of telemetry-linked mecha detected his withdrawal and evaluated it against his duty. He was willfully rejecting his assigned task, and aside from the reasoning, he knew it, and so they knew it. They voted and had no dissent, and triggered his control system as a warning. Both his pleasure and pain centers flared with brief voltage, then the pleasure charge faded leaving only the pain.

Then the charge was removed.

It brought him out of the telepathically induced cocoon very effectively. His conditioning took over and he built a wall before stopping to think about what had happened.

He’d been shaped, manipulated by a strong telepath geared toward suggestion.

Rogue.

The fleet became unimportant. The station, the assault, the Delegates became unimportant.

Even the Victory could be sacrificed if it became necessary. Higher conditioning engaged. A telepath was a resource that could not be built; they could only be found and trained. A starship, even a jump ship, could be replaced.

A rogue telepath was a loose cannon that had to be silenced at all costs. If she could be collected as a resource, a Rectification class battleship was a fair trade. If not, she had to be neutralized, and the Victory, Collegium Station, and all the fleet nearby were acceptable losses.

A quick telemetry command send the order for any available torpedo to target the Poetry, though the message might not make it across the intervening space in time, and he hoped to keep her from getting away or dying.

Telepathic combat was not Reese’s forté as a receiver, but he’d been trained. Time to put his weakness to the test.

I see you.

The new thought blossomed out from the Victory, the PsioniCorps agent there informing the field that Fleet was still watching Rather than threatening or commanding obedience, it only informed, an admonition that each should do as he believed was right, since there could be no escape. The omniscient eye of the Dominion would find them all out, and whatever followed was only what each deserved.

In particular, however, Reese directed his attention at her, and cast the light of his own perceptions across the field. There she was, naked and exposed. Here, this is the rogue who is trying to manipulate you.

She screamed, literally and figuratively, verbally and telepathically. Exposed!

She turned and focused her rage on him. You, DIE!

But Reese was listening, carefully touching her with his gentle perceptions, and knew what she was planning as she coiled for a most direct and lethal strike. He had been very well trained; he had already erected a barricade of disdain for her crude, brutal methods, and used it to deflect the force of her order. He turned away his open mind, gave her only the back of his metaphorical hand as he brushed the directive aside as the screaming of a spoiled child, yet kept that soft contact so that he knew when she was done.

The force of her assault shuddered the careful bunker he’d constructed in his mind, introduced cracks by the sheer, unadulterated purity of her malice. He blinked, writhed in his tank, but managed by the barest margin to maintain his outward facade. This would require finesse, and he’d best not make any more mistakes.

She struck directly, with strength and ferocity. He touched her and anticipated each move, redirected it like an ancient warrior brushing her straight lines aside and into circles. He had been trained in hand to hand combat, and had spent many hundreds of hours riding the experience of Warner, who was a true master of the art. He turned away, turned her as well, guiding her thoughts to the fact that he was unimpressed, embarrassed for her, shedding disdain that soaked her will and washed away some of her confidence.

She was so strong! He knew that if he ever let her get a firm grip on his mind just once that he would truly die, but she was careless and clumsy and undisciplined, and though she had learned to use her mental weapons very well, she had never really learned any defense other than a good offense.

Reese was strong enough, but his forté was not frontal assault. He was a listener. His teachers had known that.

He listened. He touched her, felt her fear that she might not be able to stand her own against an actual Fleet telepath. He heard her need to prove herself. He tasted her sharp, stinging pain that he had so easily brushed aside her best, strongest attack, and shown only disdain for her. He smelled the acrid terror that he had so easily been able to expose her, when anonymity had always been her power.

She didn’t even have a name. She had erased it, expunged it from her own misty mind long ago. An invisible girl needed no name.

Mist, he named her, and sent it across the starship crews, pointed them at her little gondola. She is ethereal, ephemeral, she wanders among people like fog and is MISSED, but fades to insignificance under the light of day. There she is, in a derelict ship with no armor, no weapons.

STOP! He turned and deflected her insistence with wry humor and derision, a snicker. It hit him hard; he ceased his projection, drew into himself to tighten the wall, but again kept a tendril of attention not on what she wanted, but on how she felt about what he said.

She was terrified. She was appalled. He strained, but reached out, using all his will, and though he managed only a brief flash against her order - There she is -  she shuddered under the exposure.

For any telepath, having someone’s direct attention was like being the target of a shouted megaphone monologue. Reese knew that better than anyone, for as a strong receiver he suffered more than most under the focused attention of many. It had taken him a great deal of training to learn to erect the barriers that would protect him, but all that training and practice paid off now as he used the same skills to parry her projected will.

He sensed that she had always lived in terror of that feeling, the barrage of thoughts that were so hard to keep out, when a group realized you could hear them and flared up in fear and revulsion, casting hatred, berating you, and mentally shutting their eyes and plugging their ears and screaming LALALALALALALALALA!! in your general direction.

Now he used that, a twofold sword that would cut them both if he didn’t manage it with finesse. He flicked the tassle at her as he grinned.

There, he poked again. Right there, in that ship, that one, on the bridge, in the Captain’s chair, naked but for a blanket she pulls around herself because she’s feeling insecure. A child! Poor little girl -

STOP! STOP, STOP IT! In her panic, she focused all her energy on telling him not to do this, and he had to relent, to hide behind an image hand-waving lack of care, whatever, heaping more disdain, but he felt the force of her rising fury driving his blood pressure up. So very strong...

But his guards also sensed his dutiful intent as well as his distress, and again voted unanimously to trigger a flood of endorphins and corticosteroids to augment his performance at a critical moment. He felt the rush, the elation, the confidence and strength that pure bodily chemicals could add, and they were exactly what he needed.

Lies and the fear of detection, he whispered, slowly coaxing himself past her injunction against pointing the fleet’s attention toward her again. A child sneaking cookies, having a tantrum that she’s been caught, ashamed of her petty need, her vanity, the malice we all abhor. He clenched his teeth. There, he managed, again turning them to focus back on her, pointing with a telepathic finger, gesturing broadly to her ship, waving a symbolic spotlight over in her direction, though even now he couldn’t quite indicate her specifically. Even so, he felt her recoil, the shackles of her power shattering as she curled up in her revulsion.

~fine~ she hissed. He heard her seethe. Let’s see how you like it. He felt her breathe in, gather her power, and push it out.

No, look at HIM. Listen to HIM. Pay attention to HIM!

And they did. They were all turned to her, sizzling with the hostility he had suggested but focused and receptive. The power of her telepathy rolled outward, specialized and concentrated on controlling and manipulating others, and burned into their brains. They could not help but do as she had bid.

The crews of the combined fleet rotated their minds to him like a vast field of reflectors in the sun, slowly focusing all their collective attention on the Receiver. Reese had played a gamble, and this was how the cards had fallen. He folded up behind his Happy Place and prepared for the onslaught.

They turned. They focused.

They listened, with the impetus of her power behind the intensity of their rapt, careful, complete attention.

With that sort of open and channelled mindset, even a receiver like Reese could drop very binding suggestions on a sweeping scale.

Thank you, he told them, blinded beneath the glare of their open minds, but speaking into the crowd behind the stage lights that cooked him. Thank you all for coming, for listening to ME, the representative of the rightful authority here, the person placed for your protection. Close your ears to HER. Do not listen to anything further that she says. Do not let her lies and manipulation harm you anymore.

She realized too late what she had done.

NO!

He continued, reinforcing the protection he could now give to his captive audience. She must be silenced. You cannot let her get away to harm others. He redirected their attention toward her again, but carefully now. Do not listen to her, but do not let her get away. Keep your eyes on her, but your ears deaf to what she wants.

The glare of their attention began to lessen as they kept their metaphorical ears attuned to him, but their watchfulness turned back to her. Hear me, see her. Do not let her hide. Do not let her escape. Do not let her manipulate you any further.

She withered under the heat and hostility of their gaze. In terror, in boundless indignation, she resorted to pure imagery, pushing their anger and resentment back toward him, but the tide was against her.

He recalled his early youth on a catamaran on Crest. His father would say he had the weather gauge on her.

Reese sighed as she withered, wilted under the strain and collapsed, drawing inward, but without any training, and no defense but to hide.

There was no hiding from this. He felt pity for her, but the pang of a warning from his mecha guard excised it. Pity for a rogue was not allowed.

NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Waking

It is a great round bed in a shaded place, a bower built in the peace and shelter of a cave I know from my earliest days. The sounds of surf and light breeze moaning at the mouth of a cave play in the distance, highlighted by the dripping of dew to tidal pools nearby, but here it is warm and dry, with the faint feathering of morning light seeping in to brush the curves of her sleeping smile, her dancer’s arms arrayed above her head, the valleys and ridges of the sheet drawn carelessly over her outstretched torso.

I place a knee onto the bed, then another, taking care not to wake her. I settle onto my bare feet, now clean of sea and sand, to stare, to admire her.

She is perfect.

Time slides away, but does not intrude. The morning never brightens. The tide never comes back in to soak this hideaway bed. I have a private eternity to stare, though eventually she shifts, turning her face to the other side and rubbing her cheek on the pillow, never dropping the soft smile still reminiscent of her ever-present smirk.

I take a deep breath, but rather than the salt air of home, I am filled with the merest wisps of her perfume, that sweet smell of spices and precious oils that lingers in the sheets and on her body. I close my eyes to savor it. It makes me want to give her my soul.

Slowly I lean down to prostrate myself across the altar that is her, my knees by her hip, my face lying in the hollow of her plexus with only a thin and aromatic sheet between her skin and my own face, my hands reaching up to cradle her bare, perfect shoulders. Here, I do nothing but breathe and worship. Ancestors, do not be offended. Gods above and below, do not be jealous. None of you have offered me the love and care this woman has promised. None of you have ever so pleased my eyes, or offered me tender flesh for the joy of my hands as they slide up her extended arms. No incense of worship have I ever inhaled which gave me such intoxicating peace.

She stirs, inhales. I ride these subtle movements with the focused joy of an epicure. I do not yet move.

“Good morning,” she whispers, and reaches down, one hand to my upraised arm, one to my back. I look up toward her face, across where her movements have exposed her breasts, to the eyes that transfix me.

“What are you doing?” she asks, still in a sleepy whisper, with that tiny smile.

I lift and reposition, laying my face across her bosom, hugging her breasts with my hands, her ribs with my elbows.

“Worshipping,” I answer, with no sarcasm. Her smirk deepens as she repositions one of my hands more intimately, her nipple square in my palm as she squeezes it against her, the knuckles of both our hands brushing my temple. With her other hand reaches to caress my upturned ear.

“Well you should,” she says. It has the ring of familiarity. She is silent for a time before she speaks again. Her nipple hardening in the palm of my hand threatens to commandeer all my attention, but I am determined to take in all of her.

“I am glad you aren’t ugly and crass,” she said. She is grinning, but her words are soft, sincere.

I smile, and manage not to blush.

“Me, too,” I say.  I cuddle her close, revel in the touch of soft skin and full breasts. I kiss between her cleavage and she folds her arms around my head and shoulders, kisses the crown of my scalp.

“Come, my Lord,” she whispers, with only a hint of humor. “Your children await. Do your duty.”

She cannot say this last without a lascivious snicker. I grin in response, and lift myself forward to kiss her throat, to -

The lifeboat pinged and shuddered, and Kas came awake. He blinked, then stiffened and kicked, trying to run as he realized where he was, how vulnerable, how helpless, but the straps held him in place. His ears filled with the sound of a siren. His throat filled with bile. The dream memory of a warm embrace was crushed and wiped away.

The Pilot veered out of the debris and quieted the proximity alarm. The sudden silence was deafening, then slowly filled with the sussurance of the engine and his own ragged breathing.

Some people live in ships and spend their lives travelling from world to world, Kas thought. I’d go insane.

It occurred to him that his father had been posted here, to duty on this station, and Kas would likely be here for another year or three at least.

The flash of a brilliant explosion from ahead dismayed him. There soon might be no more station.

For the first time, his fear for his own life sunk beneath a horrible epiphany - his father might die.

The universe began to turn sideways.

Sample Post: the opening scene from Bubbler

Prelude

1

Kas flinched, blinking and rolling his eyes against the sudden brightness of the lights through the clear liquid perflourocarbon filling the room. Not again.

Maith’s voice filled the room, drifting from the speakers as she glided from her niche.

“Mer Joans thrashes again, young master Salipoor. He is having another nightmare. Shall I touch him?”

Kas set his reader down and glared across at his bunkmate, a standard-type human still twitching and straining against his netting, veins swollen and blue in his reddening face, his abdomen heaving. Do, he signed with an affirming nod, slowly squeezing a breath of the heavy fluid from his lungs.

She turned and kicked once, sliding smoothly the short distance across the room to rescue the frightened young sleeper. Kas grumped at the body sheath she’d taken to wearing while Cayleb Joans was aboard and might see her – not for her modesty, to which she’d never been conditioned, but for the young human’s comfort. Maith was modified, but was modeled after them, the standard type most common across the Dominion, if small and pale and lithe and perfect…so much more like Cayleb than himself, though Cay was darker than either of them by many shades.

He brooded and watched her trying to wake the dry-breather. A bubbler like himself, unable to breathe real water, but from a whole race where such a thing was considered normal.

Mom?

Cay was little again, maybe seven, trying to walk to the duty station where his mother usually sat her shift watching monitors. The hall was familiar, but reverted in memory to gargantuan scale; he moved his feet, always sure and steady in the familiar rotation, but now they only drifted in the strange, not-quite-weightlessness of an absurdly heavy medium.

He was afloat, and baffled. Mom?

He couldn’t speak. His throat was full of water. His lungs were full of it, his sinuses, his ears.

He panicked, but he couldn’t scream.

“Mer Joans. Cayleb Joans. You must wake, Mer Joans. You are safe. You are not drowning, Mer Joans. You must allow yourself to breathe, but slowly, so that you do not damage your throat or lungs.”

Maith managed to get the netting off him and free him into the room. He bobbed toward the ceiling just a little too near the door, where he might have bobbed up into the real water, though there was still no immediate danger; he’d have to take the netting off the hole, go through it, and then turn himself upside-down for his lungs to begin to empty of the hyperoxygenated PFC fluid fast enough to matter. Even so, she followed him up to help him calm down, but the rap on his skull when he impacted the ceiling did more than the soft drone of her voice.

Kas began to sign irritably. Maith’s voice translated over the speakers, freakishly morphing into Kas’ own.

“My master asks: What’s wrong with you, Cay? By the damned, there’s only one chamber fitted for us on this bottle, so unless you want to sleep up on the command decks, you need to stop it!” Kas rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his webbed hands before he continued. “And before you think you’re going to try that, those are full of crew running around doing ship stuff, and they’re too busy to have you sprawled underfoot. Damned! Take care of him.” She translated the last as well as all the rest, though it was directed to her.

He let go of his own net and drifted up as well, though not as fast as Cayleb. Standard humans were lighter than Hydrans, and could hardly stand more than superficial pressure changes. Yet I’m the handicapped one, he though bitterly. He sucked his lungs full before he opened the door netting and bobbed up into the next room, leaving Maith to take care of the drowned, trembling, disoriented Cay. He heard her switch back to her own voice over the intercom to sooth the distressed young man, dutifully treating him to the dressing Kas usually received himself. The light shining up from the bedroom below lit this room in streaks and shadows. Kas could feel the lesser weight of true water around him, the difference in the way it stuck to his skin. He breathed out just a little of the PFC fluid to make some room and felt it running slowly down his chin and chest and crotch, headed surely for the slightly sloped floor which would drain it back into the bedroom for reprocessing.

Real water, he thought, waving his hand through it to feel the currents. He knew it wasn’t really from Hydra’s seas, but was carefully constituted to be a clean and healthy approximation, plus a few harmless agents to help the life support system. In here it was cool to his skin, comfortable. He tasted the salt on his tongue as he breathed it in carefully, just a shallow breath to savor, though he didn’t pull it in far enough to reach his lungs. Real water. This is what my father is breathing in his room. He set his jaw and closed his inner lids, then slowly slid his true eyelids down over the nictitating membranes and swallowed reflexively. My father, Ra Salipoor Den, statesman and exemplar of our planet’s people…appointed Delegate for the planet of Hydra to the Federal Dominion Collegium, and last of the great gen Salipoor but for me, Den Salipoor Kas, his handicapped, melodramatic bubbler son. Alas, how the mighty have fallen.

941 GUARANTEED WAYS to Write PERFECT CHARACTERS!!!!!

Yeah, right. Sell me a bridge.

We all know there are no guarantees, or any perfection. The trick is to find dependable ways to be good. For that, you gotta "pay your dues" and "put in your time", and we all get tired of hearing that.

Tough.

There are things that can help, though. People say "write what you know," but writers must sometimes write things of which they know little. My hero takes a heavy dose of hallucinogens, but I've never tried them. He kills several people and has to decide how to deal with it. I've never killed anyone.

Some things are simple. I've never been stung by a lionfish. Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia.

But characters? Every character sees the world differently. I can only write characters I know if each is me or some horrible Mary Sue. That's not what I want, and not what a reader wants.

You'll hear that every character is the heroine of her own story. No one is "just" a sidekick or a plot device. Everyone is in their own egocentric predicament, but how do we show it?

A wife gets up to feed dogs and let them all out. The husband grabs coffee and stumbles to his office. If we say no more, the reader reads what they choose. It's normal and no one thinks twice, or he sympathizes with one and rails at the other. We want him to sympathize with both.

She doesn't ask for help, because she doesn't feel she contributes enough. The eldest can get cereal while caged critters get their care, but she sighs that the husband doesn't help with the toddler before rushing to tweet and check Facebook. She manages not to complain, and life goes on. 

He wants to post that "she feeds the dogs and leaves me hungry." He grinds his teeth over expensive specialty food, vet bills, dog hair in his coffee and the couch they replaced because of the puke, but so few things make her happy. He manages not to complain, and life goes on.

Both are dissatisfied with the other's behavior. Both keep quiet out of love. Both fail to see the other's perspective in any depth, because they are individuals.

Voila! Conflict. Depth. Opportunity for foreshadowing about something later in the book more important than petty differences in preferred morning rituals. A chance for each to be an ass, to learn, to feel chagrined, to grow.

A chance for the reader to vicariously see the world through someone else's eyes. A chance to feel, which is what writing fiction is about.

Make it count.