Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

39 thoughts on “Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.”

1. The instructor looked at the damage in the Danger Room and asked “Now students, what was the problem here”.

   “Ah, I set my shields to reflect the power of the attacks?”

   “Correct. The First Rule of Ultra Combat is to protect civilians. Reflecting the power endangers your surroundings and any civilians nearby. Shields must absorb the power. Yes, it is more difficult but it is necessary when civilians may be near the fight.”

2. The gate shimmered slightly looking like a pool of water hanging incongruously vertical in the air but reflecting no image back to the viewer. The drone quad copter entered the gate at the center and disappeared. As soon as it passed through communication was lost but, if all went well, it would fly a short circuitous path and return the way it came in a few minutes.

3. “‘Images in a Mirror’?” Karl guffawed. “Other Nobelians have invisibility or super-speed, and you can… what, reflect things? Make people see themselves? Pitiful! Absolutely…”

   Then he stopped abruptly, and flushed. “Boorish, that was,” he murmured. “Forgive me, Sonja.”

   Sonja Undset smiled. “That’s all right,” she said. “Everybody make mistakes sometimes.”

4. The path wound about a willow, and beyond lay a round pool reflecting roses in red. A merry lass of stone had lifted a pot to her shoulder and let it endlessly spill into the waters, sending ripples through the roses and the sound of endless plashing through the air.

   1. Nice imagery!

      1. glad you like it!

5. Then, he made a mistake. Sensible one, but fatal. His partner had me pinned down, so he had cleared his magazine, switching to a full magazine for when he came out from cover to engage me. He had no time to reflect on his mistake as I had managed to clear my corner, and come around with my pistol raised and firing just as I saw him. I put three rounds high and left in his chest, the suit-burster rounds fused automatically when they didn’t detect any real resistance and exploding inside his body. The arm, still holding the fresh magazine, dropped to the floor as there wasn’t much left of his shoulder and chest on that side of his body.

   1. Wow, what an image!

      1. Thank you, not fun to get hit by smart explosive shells.

6. “You might wanna reflect on your present situation and reconsider your chosen course of action, friend.”

   “Hey fuuuuuuhhhhh…..” Griggs’ curse trailed off as his eyes crossed comically. Finding oneself abruptly on the wrong end of a LaForce Arms .550 Enforcer, like the one that had just appeared in Fletcher’s hand, does tend to have that effect.

   “As I said, friend, reflect, reconsider, and maybe seek life elsewhere.”

   “Yeeeaaaaaahh, I…. uh… I was… just… uh… just goin’.”

7. “We decided to call that mode Kinetic Reflection. The force shield reflects an impacting object’s energy back on itself, sending the object in exactly the opposite direction at almost the same velocity.”

   “Which means?”

   “If somebody shoots at me, the bullets bounce back and usually hit them. So you see, you can’t charge me with a crime. They all shot themselves.”

   1. “I am rubber, you are glue…”

8. “Funny that you should bring up the mirrors”, Prof Sombore said. “You’re aware that reflections make the jacobian, the measure of the *oriented* volume in some space relatively negative. If you take this object on the table and rotate it, you can bring about a ‘reflection’ as far as any two of the axes are concerned, but the third ends up oriented differently. Chirality, handedness, what have you is preserved.”

   “Now a rotation is something you’re used to thinking of accomplishing continuously. Given a rotation, you can think of rotating it along the same axis through half an angle. You’re also used to thinking of reflections as something that happens suddenly in a discrete step. Now: You may know enough mathematics by now to derive what happens if you take *half* a reflection. What does that operator look like, and what does it suggest about what’s really going on so abruptly here?” he said tapping the surface of the mirror.

   1. 🙂

      I remembered that when writing Though A Mirror, Darkly.

9. I really did plan to write a thought out exactly fifty word vignette but upon pondering, contemplating, considering, one plot after another, imagining surrounding environments, exploring various time lines, my mind leaping back and forth and then forth and back again I, alas, concluded, upon careful reflection, I got nothing.

   1. Heh. I see what you did there.

   2. 1. What happened to my ?

         1. Well, WP doesn’t like “snicker,” in pointy brackets.

            1. You mean, <snicker>

               How did I do that?

               With a little HTML: &lt;snicker&gt;

10. “Reflect on this, my dear sister.” He spread his arms indicating the walls about. “A charming place to stay, a convenient place to sleep. But not exactly a place to live out your life, even your life until your wedding day. There are many wonders out there, if you want.”

11. Max lathered up, and made a hesitant beginner’s move with the razor. In the mirror, he tried to picture Cari peering over his shoulder. She’d probably laugh, Max thought, seeing me slice myself up for the first time.

    But Cari was a thousand miles away, and Max struggled to focus.

    By the way, I enjoyed Tanager’s Fledglings very much!

12. With the meal done, Robert pushed aside the plates and looked at Aidan and Imogene. The two looked sober, ready to reflect on his every word.
    As if, thought Edwin, this were the time for sage advice. That would come if they survived their follies in the field long enough.

13. He realized the theory was sound. An infinitely reflecting mirror pair displays all alternate dimensions. By reducing the density of the reflecting medium, he could pass through the reflecting interface into different dimensions. Only two problems remained. How to select his destination, and more importantly, how to get back home.

14. He stopped at the entrance to the room. A pit gaped at his feet, the marble columns that lined the walls stretching deep below his level. Only when a drop fell from the ceiling and broke the still surface of the water on the floor, did he understand the illusion.

15. “It’s a shame, because Ms Yarbro is an excellent writer, but I’ve never been able to get into the Count St. Germain novels.”

    “Why not? I always thought it was an interesting take on how an immortal would see history.”

    “That may be, but the first time his lack of a reflection came up, my suspension of disbelief crashed and burned. It doesn’t bother me when it’s clearly a supernatural vampire in a fantasy story. But everything else is treated so realistically, right down to his knowing how to make penicillin out of bread mold to treat infections, so I’m thinking in scientific terms and immediately trip over the impossibility of making the physics work out.”

16. If he had known, he would have learned more about survival. Except that forest like this probably did not have food enough to eat without tools. He did not have powers to cook, or butcher, any meat he caught. He was not sure he could catch any, despite his powers.

17. Totally off-topic, but sitting in registration for gallbladder surgery. Shamelessly seeking prayers.

    1. On the Way!

    2. Dear Lord, please make Dorothy’s surgery quick, complication-free, and as painless as possible. Help her to a speedy and complete recovery!

       1. Amen.

    3. done.

18. I really like your new header picture. It captures what I feel when I read good sci-fi.

19. “It doesn’t reflect light.”

    The pause after Eugen Zharkov’s simple statement stretched out and out, as if stresses were slowly accumulating in some truly unfortunate segment of fault-line rock. But he was far too useful to the Fed for any simple edifying demonstration of Party power and privilege, so after a while his questioner quietly prompted back, “So, you’re telling me it’s dark??”

    As if he was also saying “You don’t want to play with sharp objects. Do you?”

    “Yes. Perfectly dark. Literally, completely dark. At this point in the battle,” and his quick fingers brought up the cross-sync-ed images of what they were by now calling the Massacre at Mars, “we shone a 200-MW free-electron laser on their largest ship — and yet we detected no visible light returning. At all.”

    And his smile was as dark as the thing he described. “That’s like shining a big old-fashioned searchlight at a Novy Zil limousine on a moonless night in the French countryside, and seeing nothing different, between Off and On.” (Some day the contrary country people might get their electricity back. But for now it was Saddam Hussein rules for them: sun down, lights out.) “Now of course no material we know of, no matter how exotic or ‘stealthy’ or high-tech, possibly can act that way, down to parts in a million or a billion — but since they call this thing, themselves openly to us, a ‘Boltzmann field’ at least three times in our recorded conversations, it seems likely they just plain meant that.”

    His questioner, in his natty Special Services Branch uniform that was its own species of dark and nonreflective, suddenly looked very attentive indeed. “So you’re truly telling me they have some science we don’t? Not just technology that can do some very ugly and surprising things, but completely new physics that our whole planetary Global Federation doesn’t have? Despite being the sum and pinnacle of human achievement?” Patrick Gallowglass’ voice did not say, in any overt manner, that the ‘Belters’ (from the trans-Mars Asteroid Belt to some vague place in the Outer System beyond the giant planets and their much more useful moons) were a bunch of candlelit peasants squatting in a howling barbarian frontier wilderness… nor did it, for anyone plugged into the official Federation news-stream and its indispensible clear perspective on all the world, ever need to.

    “Yes. Literally new physics, embodied in some very effective technology. You could detect such a thing, as we did actually during the battle, because of the heat such a powerful laser weapon produces in this Boltzmann field; energy has to go somewhere, and the long-wave infrared says it did go there, and get re-radiated back. But it’s pretty much the ultimate stealth coating; and it can be much bigger than the ship it hides and protects — just look at the transition, from dark to light” (his fingers played on the big touch-sensitive display again) “as the field cuts off in something less than a microsecond. Though there are other angles, that show its heat was dumped into another one, far behind the ship from where we’re looking at it in the battle cameras.”

    He smiled, a sort of in-joke smile that invited his Party companion into the odd and suspect world of science and scientists — people who by their very nature and work had to deal with a stubborn reality that could not be molded and modified by the daily ebb and flow of Party dynamics. “To a physicist, the very name they use says most of it… Boltzmann, as in the radiative properties of a perfect ‘black body’ — completely absorptive, totally radiative, ideal.”

    “So how do we get this, Professor?” Gallowglass’ use of the title noted how a person dependent on credentials to work, and work legally and without the harsh disapproval of the Federation’s Global State, did so quite at its pleasure.

    Eugen Zharkov spread his hands. “That’s not clear or obvious, Liaison Officer. Across the sweep of human history, inspiration and genius do what they will. We can work — I could work — all our lives, and not necessarily find how to do such a thing, or make such a machine. If you’ve listened to the conversations as I have” (he did not use the word “negotiation” because of its implied parity between the ‘Belters’ and the Fed, of course), “you’ll have noted how they talk as if the Dark, their dim places far from the Sun like the shadows at the edge of the wooded clearing where you’ve built your campfire, was both inspiration and threat. As if out there you had to innovate and adapt, or freeze or starve.”

    “Not completely or utterly dissimilar from our world, Comrade Scientist.” His voice was dry as the valleys of Antarctica, cold as the Siberian steppes.

    “And their capital mistake, though we might yet fail to exploit it, was to let us in on the secret with a demonstration of its use in actual combat conditions; to both show and tell.” Zharkov smiled, though it must have been like smiling in a Russian winter hearty enough to freeze mercury solid in a thermometer. “There are more than a few clues to us, as to what this effect is based on, as to what new laws of the Universe have revealed themselves this way to us.”

    He dared to look Liason Officer Gallowglass straight in his blue eyes. “It will take some time, necessarily. But we will, in the end, search out the secrets of science and art and put them to work for us. The book of Nature is open to all. And eventually we will learn to read this page, too.” And spoke sincerely.

    Because he was, not just perforce but also as the descendant of generations of both German and Russian forebears, very much a creature of the State too.

    (Based on some pre-existing background, and also, ah, vignette-ish material.)

20. The Emperor’s Under-Nursemaid’s aide gave Jimson the scuffed rubber ball.

    He turned it around. “A coat of varnish mixed with a little glitter and nobody will notice—unless they handle it, and who will do that? We’ll be gone before the inventory tonight.”

    “What if the Emperor wants to play with it?”

21. Joseph strode down the hallway, his ever present body guard 3 steps behind him. Suddenly he paused, looking into a frame on the wall.
    “Wow!” He exclaimed. “I didn’t know they’d finished my portrait and had it up already.”
    “Mr. President,” remarked the agent. “That’s your reflection in a mirror.”

22. Great books on the list today, the TBR pile is getting higher!!! 🙂

    1. You ever have this temptation to lock the world out for two weeks and just try to get your To Be Read pile down?

       Or is that just me?

23. He slipped up behind the young woman looking at herself in the mirror, and bit her on the neck. She hadn’t seen the vampire coming to her…

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