Tag Archives: colony ship

Pre-order “Ruins: A Space Opera Anthology” Today

ruins

Promotional image for the anthology “Ruins.”

Ruins: A Space Opera Anthology is on pre-order now through the end of May. The anthology was created by Matt Herron and along with twelve other tales, includes my 12,000 word story “Sunrise.”

A large sleeper ship on a mission to colonize a far-distant planet is pulled off course awakening the command crew. The vessel is in the gravitational field of a highly unusual solar system, one where the star has been modified to be a thruster pulling the entire system with it toward the edge of the galaxy. What’s worse, for months, the ship’s AI has been in contact with an alien intelligence from that system which is surrounded by thousands of asteroids, shepherd objects guiding the system’s course.

Captain Art Cuevas and his crew use a shuttle to travel to one of the shepherd objects trying to get some answers, especially now that they’re too far away from their original destination to get to it before the ship’s fuel supply is exhausted.

What they find is startling and will either spell their doom or perhaps a new and unanticipated life.

Here’s a sample:

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Oh Captain!

spacecraft

Image credit: iStock – Found at numerous sources including thepromiserevealed.com

Vanessa struggled to climb out of the Salubrious Pod, sickly yellow and greenish jelly oozing off of her smooth, dark skin. She rolled over the low rim of the tub onto the cold metallic floor of the eight-by-twelve foot featureless chamber, her nude body dimly illuminated by the few flickering light tubes in the ceiling ten feet above. She shivered as the gel evaporated, and she watched a thin mist rising overhead from her body, though some of the goo clung to her short-cropped black hair, and she blinked as one drop fell from her lashes into her left eye.

“Good morning, Captain Chapman. How are you feeling?”

They’d made Sophia’s voice feminine, but the echoes coming from multiple speakers  in the ceiling still made her sound inhuman.

“Like shit, Soph.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” The AI’s reply was meant to communicate concern, but of course, as a machine, she felt nothing at all. “It is important you recover from hibernation quickly. There is a situation.”

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