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

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

1. She was staring blankly at the screen and tapping her fingers on the edge of the keypad in frustration when Twitch interrupted her bleak thoughts with a kiss in her hair. “If you’re going to spin your wheels on it, take a break and have some water.”

   “You’re right.” She closed the screen with a sigh, and snuggled into him, accepting the canteen passed into her hands. “Wait, didn’t I just drink this dry?” He hadn’t moved from where he was wrapped around her since they’d sat down.

   “Delegation. It’s like a magic power, as long as I have a team to back me up.” He grinned, and she heard several others laughing on the headset. “Drown your sorrows in drink, and then tell me why you look like you want to set the computer on fire.”

   After she lowered the canteen, Lizzes sighed, and shook her head. “Half the information I need to put in there won’t fit the format.”

   “Oh, that’s easy. First, the prelim report is just a one-pager. In fact, if you put in ‘We went looking for evidence of oil, and here’s what we found’, that’s about what he needs. As for the full report, you have time. Put the good stuff in the footnotes, or in the appendix. That’s where all the good stuff hides anyway, because the brass just glance at the first few lines and see they all fit standard formatting, and never actually look up what you stuck on page three, much less page six.”

   “You never met my thesis review committee.” She grumbled.

   “No, but I know your boss. Who do you think taught me to read the footnotes and other fine print?” Twitch was laughing again, and she looked over at Mikey, who was, in defiance of all logic and chemical stimulants, hooked into the straps and sound asleep.

2. If there is something scarier than letting a laser printer try to print out High Imperial text, I don’t want to know what it is.

   The poor LaserJet was making noises like a damned soul in Hell, only much less merciful. The heads made this “wrrrr-chunk” sound every few seconds as it continued to print, and the body of the printer seemed to quiver in sympathetic agony. “It won’t…summon anything,” I asked, carefully looking at the printer and fingering Whisper as it made a new sound, something like what a mouse would make if you stretched it by the nose and tail across a violin’s body and drew a bow across the mouse’s exposed belly.

   Cee nodded. “Absolutely. No prana flow, it’s regular ink and not conductive, and there isn’t any kind of charge going on. It’s perfectly safe.” The printer’s tone changed again, from “wrrrr-chunk” to “wrrrr-scratch“, then resumed the “wrrrr-chunk” sound. “I think.”

3. “Life extending treatments, Platinum expense account, what’s not to like about the job?”

   “Did you read the whole contract?”

   “All 730 pages?”

   “Yep”

   “It says here at the bottom, I’ll be on Ultimal Thule for 150 years!”

   “The devil’s in the detail and the detail’s always in the fine print.!”

   1. “There’s worse places than Ultimal Thule. It’s on the Network and they have full-category printers there…”

      “Oh? Where?”

      “Abdyos.”

      “…yea, you have a point. At least Ultimal Thule death is only a rare occurrence.”

4. “You nuts, Harris? We can’t print this.”

   “But, Boss, it’s the scoop of the century. An exclusive interview with the Martian All-Mother? No sponsor’s interests can be worth passing *that* up.”

   “No, I mean we can’t print these crazy Martian diacritics. Go rewrite the names in English, and
   we’ll talk.”

5. “So, what’d that hack want this time?” Harry asked, crashing down on a bar seat and ignoring the glare the bartender gave him.

   “Another interview request,” Max responded, giving the grizzled veteran the same neutral expression he gave the departing reporter. “He says it’ll make it the biggest selling issue the Dawn has ever had.”

   “You told him where to shove it, right?” the larger man replied, a look of disapproval darkening his already-rough features. “Every damn word the Dawn prints is bullshit, right down to a, and, and the.”

   “I had to make do with a simple ‘No comment,’” the swordsman responded, a mischievous smile crossing his face. “I left the harder swearing to Kuroda-san.”

   “Reporters aren’t welcome here! Period!” Kuroda interrupted, wiping away at a glass furiously. “They never apologized for calling you a mass murderer, Maximilian! And who told you you could come here, you one-eyed oaf?!”

   “The Chief invited me, thanks,” Harry grumbled, giving the Azuman man a sour look. “And I think the only use for those hacks is decorating lampposts too, you know.”

   “Eh, guess you can’t be entirely insufferable.” Kuroda admitted with a chuckle, filling a tankard with beer and giving it to the ex-mercenary before attending to his other customers, leaving the two hunters to go over the day’s events with their preferred drinks.

6. Perhaps she could find the silliest novel ever printed in the library and distract herself with that.
   Two birds, glorious in blue and scarlet and gold feathers, flew over the street together, and she laughed. No, she did not think that anything would distract her from the prospect before her.

7. She took the book in hand. It was printed, which surprised her some. There could not be a large market for it, all the more that they had to use magic on it, to keep it out of the hands of fools who could only produce disaster with its spells.

8. Some ideas I’ve been batting around for a long time now…

   “Just print my name in the name field, press my thumb on the thumb field, and that was it,” said Ben Tristram. “I’m in the fleet now. We’ll draw uniforms when we start basic training on Earth.”

   “Send me a picture, huh?” said Cherry, trying to keep her voice steady.

9. Continued from above...

   Committed to print, serious scholars referred to it as “The Battle of Eden Colony.” Popular scholars called it “Nelson in Space.”

   Fleet personnel who were there called it “Finlandia’s Last Stand” after a few drinks, and “The Battle of the Double F—k-Up” when they were hammered, which was often.

10. One more…

    On a clear twilight, one could make out Eden Spaceport, high up, a silver lattice against an indigo sky. Reserve vessels were docked there, and Paul Cambridge watched the shuttles, tiny specks in the dusk, carrying his wife and her shipmates, names on a printed duty roster, to their stations.

    1. I would be interested in learning more . . .

       1. Thanks. The scene above kind of composed itself while listening to this Sakamoto piece.

11. There were posters on various walls. In writing, not printed. Then, I wasn’t quite sure what they were written on. What did they have that was cheap enough to be used as paper for posters? Even if few enough posters to be handwritten.
    She did not stop to read them.

12. There it was, printed on the front page of the Christian Science Monitor: “It’s Boogening to Look Like Kulturkampf”

13. “A printing press,” said Angela, flatly.
    “There are many who read here,” said Celestine. “The dream does not reach many who are plowmen or spinners. Only those who have some learning, or skill, or strength.”
    “Or perhaps the others have the wit to not come,” said Angela, looking at books.

14. I hate this bloody dimension. Why can’t they have a decent number of dimensions! Do you have any idea how hard it is to fix a dimensional translator when you can’t recreate a tesseract with the necessary crystalline structure? What I wouldn’t give for something with a basic 4-D print capability.

    1. This place has always been a challenge for good reason.

15. Twenty-five hand-pulled prints by the third. It had seemed like a simple order when Lacey Beauregard had accepted it, but it was rapidly turning into a nightmare. She’d never realized just how many ways a simple four-color lithograph could go wrong. There were the obvious ones, like errors in registration, and then there were the subtle technical ones with things like ink formulation that a lot of people wouldn’t even notice — but her client was an expert, and would recognize them.

    And there was no question of bowing out at this point. She’d already spent most of her initial one-half payment buying supplies, and the rest of it had gone to basic living expenses. Somehow she had to get this order completed, to specifications, even if it meant pulling an all-nighter

16. 10 PRINT “HELLO, WORLD.”
    20 GOTO 10

    1. CTRL-ALT-DEL. Because you forgot 30 END.

    2. Now you’ve done it, you’ve started a DO LOOP… It will print forever or until it runs out of paper… Or the dot matrix heads give up the ghost…

17. She carved out one last
    cherry blossom; ink on wood:
    One Spring on paper.

18. Vincent Van Gogh sat down for dinner with Nostradamus.
    Nostradamus looked disgusted at Vincent’s painted fingers. Vincent didn’t return the favor. Not that the man’s appearance didn’t put him off, but he was more troubled by the way Nostradamus traded on his status as a time fixer to make nonsensical prophecies, with just enough echoing truth.
    They were atop the rotating tower outside time. When Vincent looked out he saw the stars wheeling and the constellations melting in a riot of vivid light and color, an imprint of the movement of time through space; the life and death of men, empires, suns.
    When he closed his eyes at night that panorama wheeled behind them, as if he were looking at a print, a picture. He must set it on canvas. Maybe then it would leave his brain, and erase the feeling that time was a monster he should stop before it devoured everyone and everything.
    Nostradamus was swilling red wine, and letting it run over his wild beard. “Shakespeare is late again,” he said.

    1. And no, I have no clue what this is about. Dan said the first sentence and this spooled out.
       Please don’t make me write it. Sounds hallucinatory.

       1. Surely you know better with this crowd?

       2. My first thought would be to avoid ordering mushroom pizza while in any Front Range city. My second thought would be, “That sounds like something out of Dresden Codax before it went farther off the deep end.”

          1. Made me think of John C. Wright’s stories of Metachronopolis, the city of time.

    2. Save it. If you get enough, you can put out a collection of standalone short-shorts.

    3. “They were atop the rotating tower outside time.”

       I confess, the first thing I thought of when I read this sentence was “What did they order for lunch?”

       Moral: Don’t read comments on an empty stomach.

19. I feel like apologizing, but reading that paragraph brought up this:
    The little man glared at the prophet. “Well, if you’re so good at predicting futures, what’s going to happen to me?”
    “Nothing much.”
    “Oh? Well, that’s a relief.”
    The prophet looked down the stretch of 30 barren years in a windowless office and tried not to weep.

20. I PRINT in cursive. I CURSE in prinitve.

21. “And this,” said Brian Markham with a merrily-hammed flourish of the light tarp off the table, “is how they royally scragged that trigger-fetished Reg patrol half a day ago.” (He had a rank, and serial number too, but the Reaction Force observed such niceties only when useful. Which was one more reason the Regulars of the Fed JAF mostly hated them.) “But the real story,” and he gave a quick nod to Alexandra Lyshenko to do the same with the oven-sized block three metres off to one side, “is where all of these seem to have come from.”

    If he didn’t sound particularly outraged that the locals — the Martians, the Red Siders, the Lib Scum — had murdered a dozen-man street patrol, well, it was because he wasn’t. Dumb DRegs has started shooting for next to no reason, and the (allegedly-unarmed) population had pulled out the most amazing kit of This and That and shot back. Enthusiastically, often skillfully, and so often with a look of grim, I-know-it’s-you-or-me determination. Gotta respect that.

    Life in the Auxilliary Rapid Reaction Force of the Federation Joint Armed Forces had a tendency to be unpredictable in duration, or downright short; all it took was one uniformed member of the L33t 0xPert KlAss giving some straight-up suicidal order, and there it was. (Suicidal for the XXPert officer, almost never; for the ARRFs underneath him/her/yit, all too commonly.) So, usual sympathy for Regular-ly suicidal incompetence was thin as Mars air.

    “Meet the Mother of All indigenous shooty-things,” Alex picked up smoothly, her (almost-)Standard English only a bit accented. “Ladies and gentlemen,” — her sly use of the old phrase would’ve got her demeritted harshly if any of the zampolits or Regular brass had been around — “this is where most-all of what you see there on that table came from. On an estimated timescale of days, not weeks or months, and likely from basements all over Skia City here, not any manufactory or even local shop.” She smiled a merry sort of smile, at least conventionally at odds with her subject. “You’ll note that, unlike say the old pattern of dropping Sten Gun plans into occupied Europe, there are a lot of designs in just this small sample, not only small variations, and most of ’em turned out pretty combat effective.” Waited a beat. “At least against dumb-ass sitting-duck Drafty-Regs in issue armor.”

    As if it’d been choreographed, or maybe because it had, she went over to the table as Brian went to stand by that solid-looking box. And hefted one of the longer examples among the ranked weapons easily — which even though it took over two and a half times the mass to produce the same weight as on Earth, still meant she was uncommonly strong for a woman. “This is a fairly conventional firearm: burning double-base smokeless powder, local home or shop manufacture by the between-sample variations; 0.50 caliber sabotted down to 0.30 for an exit velocity around 4500 fps.” Her smile recognized her naughtiness in not using metric units, now renamed Système Globale by the New Regime. “Single-shot auto or burst of 5. And the bullets are jacketed lead alloy with a tungsten-rod core.” She looked up. “This is not sophisticated.”

    Swapped it for another, with a longish barrel and a very ‘retro’ look. “Think of this as the bastard offspring of a Brown Bess and a Girandoni Military, with a few improvements since the 18th-19th Centuries. Runs, like the Girandoni, on compressed air, though this one is about 3000 psi. Again, lead-over-tungsten ball. Rotten aerodynamics, but as a short range weapon… it kills if it finds a vital soft spot in the body armor. About 900 fps, semiauto.”

    Next picked up an even longer-barrelled gun with an odd-looking, complex set of hardware where the chamber ought to be. “Variation on the same theme, in two-part gaseous harmony. CO2 and H2 — the CO2 compresses H2 to drive the bullet at something like 8000 fps; the classic 20th century light-gas gun if well short of the miles-per-second the nonmilitary models delivered. Polymer-moly-coated copper and tungsten projectile. Slow semi-auto, but this one can and did go through two thicknesses of standard-issue body armor and a man in the middle. More like ‘sophisticated’ by this point.

    “But not so much as this puppy, here.” There was an obvious effort to her still very smooth movements as she picked up the next, with a stubby-ish ‘barrel’ that was more a pair of flat metal strips spaced inside a transparent glass or plastic tube. “Yes, this is what it looks like. Heavy little sucker, not very handy at all. A touch inefficient, even with the dielectric-gas tube it sparks over in firing.” She grinned broadly. “It also takes… if you will, Brian…” and waited till he’d picked up a heavy backpack-sized thing from behind the boxy little ‘printer to say, “…a power reservoir, basically a Faraday wheel kinetic storage generator. Two-three shots a charge. But,” (that smile again, like the dawn) “it’s a personal railgun.12 to 15 K feet per second, hits like a bazooka. The vids you’ll have seen… understate the results.”

    And she yielded over to Brian, who’d put the clumsy-looking, 250-kilo spinbat down on the boxy ‘printer. “None of this equipment is mass-produced or off the shelf. All of it, though, is pre-designed and almost all of it pre-tested, back sometime in the past here. And this box, this, is what puts that all together. Three-dee, UV-laser-sintering metal-powder printer. Makes rough blanks, or even low-tolerance finished products, from dust… iron, steel, brass, tungsten, Inconel, Hastelloy, any or all of that stuff. Not good enough by itself to make a final product gun barrel, or even a decent inside or outside precision thread.”

    He smiled, not unlike Alex had. “But, Malloy, tell us how that gets solved.” At which a reddish-faced man stood up from the small crowd.

    “Plus-minus. Additive manufacturing followed by subtractive. You make a blank that’s almost an in-spec barrel or receiver or — uh, whatever you call the bits and pieces of those other things — then bore or mill or grind it, ‘conventionally’ as they used to say, to shape. Much easier than trying to make a whatever-it-is from raw metal stock. Especially if you’re clever about it.”

    “And the reason” — Alexandra had picked up smoothly — “just about everyone who lives in Schiaparelli City has one of these down in the ‘basements’ off their top-level, pseudo-Earth houses, is that these big boxy things are one of the pillars of their whole economy. Everyone needs parts, to fix all the stuff needed to keep life going… and except for a few things, say like the ‘printers themselves, none of it is mass-produced in anything like a Terran factory.”

    “So this is it, then, for us if not the Chain of Command or the D-Regs yet,” said Brian with a sort of wistful smile on his face. “Nobody can ‘take away all the guns’ in any meaningful way, because they’ll just make more while our backs are turned. You can’t take away the ‘printers without an instant shortage of all sorts of critical parts, because that’s how those are usually made, one each as needed. You can’t ‘interdict the flow of guns’ because they’re made on site or even at the point of use. You can’t find a ‘technology chokepoint’ because this basketful of technologies, here, together don’t have one.”

    And that smile deepened, widened. “We’re the ARRF-holes that everyone else on Earth, JAF included, loves to hate. We’re the best and the brightest killers the Mommy Planet can make. But unless we want to be dead-center of a big crossfire between Martians and Feds, or get Swalwelled when the Fed Expert Class nukes Mars out of pure anti-rebel spite… we need to get clever fast.

    “Comments?”

22. Miri glanced over when she heard a tiny scritching sound over by the low stone wall, then froze. SOMETHING had just left a print, nearly the size of her hand, in the weathered surface.

23. Thanks for the previews / reviews!

    Another good review site for sci fi and fantasy is.

    https://thebooksuite.com/

    1. We don’t review. I just echo the book listing.

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