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Genre: Science Fiction
About StarDragonBlueLocation: Texas Home Region: Age:24 Favorite novels: Til We Have Faces, The Magician's Nephew, Les Miserables, Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers, Jungle Book, Just-So Stories, Harry Potter Favorite writers: C.S. Lewis, Victor Hugo, Rudyard Kipling Favorite music: Coldplay, Strauss Non-noveling interests: Punting small children |
Joined: November 1, 2006 This Year: Official Participant NaNoWriMo History: NaNoWriMo posts: 51 NaNoWriMo buddies: 16
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Brief Author Bio: When Rachel was born, a star exploded in the heavens, obliterating a planet of sentient, omniscient aliens. Knowing this was a bad sign, her parents tossed her over a cliff. Fortunately, she fell onto a ledge and was saved by cliff-dwelling marmots. When Three Wise Men came from the East to deliver gold, frankincense, and myrrh, her marmot parents pawned it and bought an underground mansion for themselves in New England. Rachel grew up among the marmots and learned how to speak Marmotese, which sounds like a squeaky cabinet drawer. She learned English from passing bums, and her first word was "100-proof." When she finally entered public school, there was an adjustment period with the teachers and many Parent-Teacher Conferences with her parents. Common complaints were such things as she "smelled like roadkill," "insisted on skittering around on all fours," "ate all of the crayons," and "dug holes beneath the building and compromised the foundations of the cafeteria." At first, her parents pressed the school with a lawsuit, claiming that the school discriminated against Rachel for her marmot heritage. "Digging holes is a pasttime for all marmot children," their lawyer said. "It instills work ethic and keeps them safe from hawks." Her marmot parents went through a difficult period in their marriage during these early school years and got a divorce when Rachel was eight. She never really got over it and wrote a lot of brooding poems. It was the start of epic writing genius. Rachel visited her father marmot on weekends and holidays and lived with mother marmot. She enjoyed English classes throughout her school career, and was often seen skittering around with books under each arm, bent over, as though ducking sniper fire. She could be seen hiding in dark corners of the library with books heaped up above her head, and was known school-wide as "that creepy Neanderthal person who lives two aisles over from the dictionaries." Eventually she graduated high school with top marks, and then went to college on a scholarship for marmots, where she got a B.A. in English. Her collegiate career was unremarkable except for the fact that she finally learned to bathe. She currently lives in an underground burrow with her marmot mother and father, who got back together in the summer of 2006. She has twenty-six brothers and sisters of varying ages and about 80 nieces and nephews. |
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Synopsis: The Last Starship//A Perfect Gentleman
THE LAST STARSHIP: (50,075, done)
Trillions of years have passed and human beings have dispersed among the stars. Alas, life cannot continue forever. The universe has continued to expand, and the galaxies' headlong flight has thrown them so far from each other that their inhabitants can no longer see even the faintest wink of their neighbors. One by one, the stars begin to die, until only white and brown dwarfs are left. Scientists of today would call it the Degenerate Era of the Big Chill.
Humans have survived so far by leaping from white dwarf to white dwarf, harvesting each star's energy and scrounging for asteroids, comets, and faint clouds of gas. The mother ship circles the dwarf while the smaller ships harvest what they can from the slowly dying galaxy.
This method has worked well... until now. For there is only one white dwarf left, and the resources around it are swiftly dwindling. There is only one hope: to use the energy of the final white dwarf to form a wormhole leading into an alternate universe. The scientists of the mother ship work feverishly to finish what generations before have not been able to solve. Meanwhile, the smaller ships wander out further and further to fill their quotas...
Then the starship Canary, furthest out, receives a message to return. The scientists have been successful! They have crafted something they call the Porthole: a doorway into another dimension.
But when the Canary returns, its inhabitants immediately see that something is wrong.
For there is the Porthole, inactive...
the entire fleet is gone...
and in their way sits an alien ship.
Not only are they are not alone, they are not the only ones who wish to survive.
And these strange visitors do not find it difficult to resort to violence...
A PERFECT GENTLEMAN.
Khalida is having a really bad day. Not only has her best friend been killed by her overbearing rich employer, she's just been "hired" by Death himself as one of her city's local reapers. There are a few downsides, though: even though she isn't technically dead, she's also not in the world of the living anymore. Oh, and if she doesn't kill people? She stops existing entirely. She now needs to kill like she once needed to eat.
In her efforts to escape Death's employment, she must travel from the pits of Hell to the top of Heaven. All the while, she must balance killing with evading a team of fallen angels seeking to destroy Death and all his cohorts.
It's a difficult challenge for a little mortal. But then again, Khalida isn't exactly one to give up easily.
Excerpt: The Last Starship//A Perfect Gentleman
The countdown began on the seventh day. The Bridge was full of Pilots and Technicians; the ship shuddered intermittently as they slowed. They could barely see the little black blotches against the stars that would blossom into fully-fledged ships, and the red pentagon of the receiving Gate growing closer and closer.
Dunamis leaned over the console re-checking coordinates and reading the wormhole’s status. The star was now so massive that it filled the entire viewscreen; a pulsing white ball of light, surrounded by a Dyson’s Sphere, which collected its energy for use in the fleet.
The ship shuddered again, and again, as though attempting to buck the laws of time and space. The countdown reached a minute, then seconds. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight…
Everyone hesitated over their consoles, praying that no one was stupid enough to park their ship in front of the Gate, praying that the ancient receiving Gate would be stable enough to take their ship, praying that the next shudder wouldn’t tear off a piece of the ship…
Seven.
Six.
Five…
Dunamis leaned forward and squinted.
“Wait,” she said. Everyone turned to look at her.
Four.
Dunamis covered her eyes with her hand and enhanced the tint of the window to better see. Against the light of the white dwarf, it was very hard to see the ships – there were only misshapen blobs, which the light enclosed halfway.
Three.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “The ships don’t look right.”
Two…
One.
They rocketed out of the Gate, followed by a flash and a stream of light; behind them, the Gate’s lights changed from the green in-transit lights to the blue light of standby. And just as suddenly, the entire ship bucked and rocked, and there was a horrible screaming groan of metal on metal, and the ship began to turn sideways. On every side, Pilots tumbled out of their seats. Dunamis only kept hers because she was leaning on the console. She gritted her teeth, stabbed the balls of her feet against the console, and leaned against the arm of her chair.
“Damn damn damn!” said Dunamis, typing like mad. What she was saying in her mind was “Shield up, shield up, shield up!”
The tiny magnetic shield – more for deflecting micro-meteors than large pieces of space junk – kicked on with distressingly small results. Damage reports began flashing in red on her right. On her left were scrolling levels of text: messages rushing in from all over the ship, queries and reports and curse words that really shouldn’t have been broadcast on her channel.
Before them coasted the blackened shell of a ship – no, half of it, a horrible twisted corpse. There was a hole blasted through the center of it, and the jagged, sharp lips of it grinned at them like a hungry dead-eyed shark. Hulking, twisted pieces floated around it, hovering on sparkling waves of glass. Through the clouds of glass drifted horrible misshapen human forms, silhouetted against the Dwarf as they floated along as though enacting a sadistic aquarium scene.
Everyone on the Bridge was screaming – Dunamis might have been, too, but she wasn’t really paying attention to that. She was lifting the ship before she ever really thought about it, urging the nose to point at a ninety degree angle. The entire bulky craft – made more for slow coasting and large, roundabout turns – began to groan and creak and rattle. Every screw bemoaned Dunamis’ ridiculous angle, every plane of metal wept at her requests. The engines groaned to answer her commands and there was an awful undertone to their sound that she had never heard before. With a curse, Dunamis shut off the status messages flashing by on every side. Just her, the hull of the ship rushing toward her, and the Dwarf swallowing everything up behind it.
She blasted the engines. The entire ship shuddered. With a scream, it lifted just above the wreck, grating against it. A human corpse slammed against their window, dinging it with a crack, and its limbs and trunk shattered as it slid up the window and disappeared overhead. The gravity machine malfunctioned, confused at the sudden spatial shift, and everyone on the bridge began floating for a few brief moments. Dunamis curled her legs underneath her chair and locked her knees, rising off of the chair by inches.
Klaxons howled and alarms rang and multicolored lights were flashing on the console from top to bottom. Dunamis righted the ship a little too fast; the spacecraft rolled down and to the right and the gravity machine sputtered back to life; around Dunamis, a dozen screaming people crashed to the floor. Hovering high above the dead spacecraft, Dunamis cut the back engines and fired up the fore engines, trying to stop her momentum. As she crested the corpse of the ship rolling beneath her, she looked down and her mouth fell open.
Scattered around her were the corpses of ships, cut in half or blown in thirds and fourths and fifths. A sea of detritus and dead bodies spread as far as she could see.
She slammed her hand on the console, once, twice, three times. “Dear God!” she cried, voice breaking. “Oh God! Oh God!”
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