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My SciFi short story “Tiamat Descending” has been accepted by Cloaked Press for the 2022 edition of their annual anthology Spring Into SciFi. I’ve proudly had stories published in this anthology series since 2019.

The cover displayed above will show the names of the contributors in its next iteration and the expected publication date is March 21st.

Here’s part of the official announcement on Facebook:

We are proud to present the first batch of confirmations for Spring Into SciFi 2022.

First is a newcomer to the Family, Greg Eccleston. Greg hails from the beaches of Terrigal, Australia. Love is in the air this spring with his tale, “Searching for Jodie”.

Barend Nieuwatraten III brings us a grisly tale of why you don’t transport strange life forms against customs protocols in “Unauthorized Fauna”.

We welcome Karl El-Korea to the Family with “Macbeth Undone”, where a hive mind decides the fates of humanity.

You know him, we love him, James Pyles returns to Spring Into SciFi with “Tiamat Descending”.

Nicholas Poe joins the Family with his science fiction retelling of Hand Christian Anderson’s “A Lit Match In A Tinderbox”.

Just yesterday in my blog post 69415 I posted a paragraph from “Tiamat.” It was listed as Story 8830

Here’s another excerpt. Keep in mind, the editor will probably ask for changes, so the final version may be slightly different:

Shane took a deep breath and issued the go directive. The drone overrode the locking mechanism and the door slid open. Looking at her monitor, she imagined the hib clusters as a graveyard. Each cluster held six creches for a total of ninety human beings per mod. The creche pods for each cluster formed a circle around a control core, making them look like flowers.

The drone moved into the room slowly.

“Yes, I see the lid on a creche in cluster one, the Captain’s. It’s open. There are four more open creches scattered across clusters two through six. No occupants. Indicators on all of the others are dark and…” Shane bit her lip to keep from screaming.

“Captain.” She tried not to cry but in zero G, her tear ducts filled and then tiny globes left her, traveling randomly in front of her face.

“Send me the image.” Margie tried to make her voice sound neutral but she needed to know what was happening. Then she saw the spectacle and her grip tightened on the sides of her console.

“Captain. Not all of them, but some of the corpses…they look like they’ve been torn apart. The remains are mummified but…but there are what’s left of…I don’t know, tentacles, something like that, as if something monstrous had been growing in the creche with the occupant and…”

“Are they alive? Kumar, answer me.”

That’s just a small taste. The full story reveals the investigation of the mystery of the colony ship Tiamat and why she unexpectedly returned to our solar system twelve years after launch, apparently with all crew and passengers missing or dead.

Oh, the image of the ship above is an approximation of the Tiamat’s appearance except think four rings instead of two.