If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
HEY, YES, I’M GOING TO SELF PROMOTE. AHEM:
FROM SARAH A. HOYT, COMING OUT THIS TUESDAY: No Man’s Land: Volume 2 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)
No Man’s Land
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.Volume 2
Skip thought he’d figured out the rules of survival on Elly.
He was wrong.
Now his potential allies from the Star Empire are turning up dead, one by one. Spies and saboteurs have infiltrated every level of Ellyan society, and Skip is running out of people he can trust.
As he races to save the king and archmagician—his only remaining allies—disturbing secrets about Elly’s culture emerge alongside buried truths about his own family’s past. One moment he’s explaining the bewildering concept of binary gender to confused Ellyans, the next he’s making impossible choices that could strand him on this world forever.
His last gambit is reckless. The odds of success are slim. And failure means losing everything—his mission, his allies, his only way home.
But some fights are worth the risk, even when the deck is stacked against you.
Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one you never see coming.
BUY THE BOOKS OR I’LL CONTINUE TO MAKE YOU LISTEN TO CLANKER-MADE MUSIC: Skip Hayden’s No Man’s Land
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Outer Tiers (Chronicles of the Fall Book 18)
And posted to an Outer Tier World with an orphaned guardian’s store–the official name of the oft rumored “Doomsday Cubes” so popular in cheesy spy movies.
He hadn’t counted on children in danger, buying a hundred race horses, or running head on into a corrupt colony government. But with newly acquired sidekicks, it’s full speed ahead to save an entire World as Plagues and Invasions hit the entirety of the Three Part Alliance!
FROM DALE COZORT: There Will Always Be An England II: Planet Ripper
A gripping blend of alternate history, science fiction, and military adventure set in a world where time travel, alien invasion, and World War II-era conflicts collide.
1944 Britain spent twelve grueling years in the Stone Age, leaving its World War II Allies to fight on alone and forcing brutal decisions: dispatching stranded US troops to ancient North America, while wartime factories crumbled to rust. When the nation snaps back to 1944—mere weeks after it left—it’s a superpower, boasting jets, nuclear reactors, advanced computers, and television, light-years ahead of the world.
But this Britain is a fragile giant, its defenses geared for Neanderthal raids, not modern warfare. As Nazi Germany eyes the vulnerable country, eager to exploit the chaos, an even greater peril looms: a huge, derelict artificial moon orbits Earth, self-repairing with each orbit. Whoever seizes it could dominate the planet—or doom it.
In this pulse-pounding alternate history, survival hangs on getting rusting equipment back in the fight while turning Britain’s advanced technology to war.
FROM ROBERT MULLIN: Forsake Not the Gods: Book Two of The Wells of the Worlds
For centuries, the ancient gateway between worlds has been kept a carefully guarded secret from the vampiric gods of the gray lands. But when its existence is revealed, it’s only a matter of time before the unthinkable happens and the exiled powers are unleashed upon the cosmos.
Honor and revenge, hope and despair, duty and sacrifice all meet at the crossroads of destiny in this thrilling sequel to Bid the Gods Arise.
Forsake Not the Gods is the second novel in The Wells of the Worlds, a dark sci fi fantasy series for adults and new adults
FROM HOLLY LEROY: Hostile Earth (Hostile Earth Series Book 1)
Terra Vonn is fighting to survive in a destroyed world, surrounded by unspeakable horror . . . and things are about to get much worse. After witnessing the vicious murder of her mother, Terra has a singular focus—exacting revenge on the killers. But before she can complete her plans, savagery intervenes and she is cast alone into a brutal post-apocalyptic world. As she trails the men south through a land filled with cannibalistic criminals, slave traders, and lunatics, the hunter becomes the hunted. Terra quickly learns that she is neither as tough nor as brave as she thinks she is. Worse, she may be the only one who stands between what little remains of civilization and destruction
FROM JOHN BAILEY: By Degrees: From Drift to Discipline in One Man’s Life
Raised in a house where even the thermostat testified to control, a boy learns to perform obedience without ever growing a spine of his own. Freedom at college exposes the hollowness beneath the manners, and a hard fall sends him home in shame, face to face with parents who are out of words and patience.
What follows isn’t a miracle turnaround but a painstaking rebuild: community college instead of prestige, small habits instead of grand vows, showing up before the fire starts. Momentum comes one ordinary decision at a time.
Work begins on the sales floor of a computer store, where he’s a terrible closer but a natural fixer; skills and empathy take root that no quota can measure. That stubborn, useful competence opens the door to a first real IT job—and to a perilous climb that wins praise while slowly costs him his marriage, his health, and his peace.
Then the diagnosis drops, and later—when he thinks he’s finally back on his feet—the layoff. Illness and unemployment strip away the old measures of worth, forcing him to find identity in endurance, honest community, and a quiet faith that becomes a lifeline. Scraping back is anything but cinematic, yet meaning returns in service, in telling the truth, and in the work of another ordinary day.
By Degrees is a first-person novel about learning to live without borrowed scaffolding—about failure, effort, and the kind of resilience built not in leaps, but by steady, imperfect steps.
FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Theophany
Ten years ago the Savients took over Niban, forcing the independent inhabitants into poverty and despair. Bass White saw the careless cruelty of the Savients kill his mother and his father. When a resistance cell is discovered in his city bloc, the Savients seek to make everyone pay.
With his wife Amie, Bass races into the caverns to escape the Savients’ brutal enforcers: the Atrasai. The couple barely make it to the limits of known territory outside their underground city, however, before the Atrasai catch up with them. It would take a miracle to save them…
…or a combat medic robot.
Join Bass and Amie in this sci-fi story of healing, hope, and wonder. After a decade of fear and pain, even a little light can bring out the best in man and machine. But will the best be enough to heal?
BY FREDERIC BROWN, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Screaming Mimi (Annotated): The classic pulp serial killer mystery
A drunken Irishman named Sweeney — well, to be fair, he was only five-eighths Irish, and only three-quarters drunk — made a resolution. Sticking to it took him through murder, and blood, and tracking down a sculptor on the far side of nowhere, and delivered him right up to the doorstep of a serial killer!
- This iktaPOP Media edition has a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Escape Velocity
An optimistic collection of six stories revolving around leaving Earth, or living (and making a living) further out in the solar system.
Xanadu–Sometimes, making a profit just needs an outside perspective for why it hasn’t yet.
Turing’s Legacy–It takes love to make a person. And maybe an accident.
Theory in Practice–Psychological care may well be more important in a closed environment.
Reasonable Accommodations–Microgravity could be an answer to some disabilities.
You Can’t Go Home Again–The effects of long-term isolation on asteroid miners explored.
Everyday Miracles–What could push someone to emigrate to a new off-planet colony?
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: An American in Iya (Timelines Universe Book 8
Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.
In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 (gaijin).
Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.
This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .
. . . if they still have a home to return to.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America’s first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
The Secret of Pad 34Who would put a ceiling on humanity’s expansion into space?
That’s what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Beach House on the MoonThe Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era
How would H.P. Lovecraft’s famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first?
Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft
A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: Kick
According To Hoyt 
Oh, no. Skip, you fool. Just when you think you’ve got the rules of survival figured out, a new rule will pop up and kick you in the ass. Never fails. Murphy always has the last laugh.
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Question.
Was it the Priest’s Blessing that corrected the “technical difficulty” or was it kicking the computer that did it?
Or was it neither of the above.
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Neither, but I did go to church in between. Also I had Indy sleeping on my left arm. (DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO TYPE LIKE THAT?)
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What’d happen if you used Holy Water on Indy??????????????????
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Recalling the unfortunate cat-bath experience, Don’t Be In Range. Next county might be safe. Maybe.
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That…. I don’t know.
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Technically known as preforming an “impact modulation test”.
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During my time in the military-industrial complex, the preferred term was “percussive maintenance.”
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“Oh!” said Helena. “Is that the forest?”
“I think so,” said Emalie, rising. “We should go into it and learn what we can.”
“It is hardly wise to plot here,” said Sonia. “Violetta’s family received its margravate to protect the border. They have to kick us out.”
“So it’s wiser to plot where Violetta can’t hear us?” said Giles.
“Hunters go into the forest, often,” said Violetta. “As is our duty, to limit how deer eat the grain. It might be arranged for others.”
“It might be wiser to remember this is a different forest,” said Jasper. “If also magical.”
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Petrowski.
The name meant nothing to me, but Harrow’s expression tightened with recognition. Later, over tea, he explained.
“Petrowski worked procurement for a defense contractor five years ago. I remember the hearings—whispers of kick-backs, questionable exports, nothing that ever reached trial. If he’s in bed with Steel City Logistics now, it fits his pattern.”
“So Kellerman stumbled across a smuggling ring, and Petrowski made sure he didn’t talk.”
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OK, this is both too long, and you have to look carefully for the prompt to make an appearance. So sue me. :)
“Will you put those things away, Legs? You know I can’t concentrate on my driving when you do that.”
She obligingly uncrossed her legs for me, but I found the full-toothed smile that followed equally distracting.
“You knew I was a goner the minute I gave you the job, didn’t you Legs?”
“I’m not sure who the goner was Rocky, but I do have something I should tell you before we get to Judge Swackhammer’s.”
Uh oh, here it comes. I felt my stomach tighten worse than the top knot of a Sumo wrestler. Every dame I ever loved felt the need to kick me to the curb sooner or later.
“All right, Legs, spill it. I can take it.”
“Well, we may need to make some new arrangements at the office at least in a little while.”
“You mean you won’t work for me after we’re married?”
“No but I’ll need some maternity leave.”
This huge lead brick where my foot used to be slammed down on the brakes.
“What, how, when?” I stammered in my usually articulate fashion as the car jerked to a stop.
“Remember when Rheingold had us locked in the trunk of his car?”
“I never could resist a woman in handcuffs,” I said wistfully.
“Well I guess neither of us is ever going to forget when it happened, although I may never be able to figure out how you did that.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, Doll, but we sure surprised Rheingold, didn’t we? It’s a good thing Swackhammer put him away.”
When we got to the Judge’s, I said, “Shall I carry you across the threshold?”
“That’s afterwards, you goof.”
Our entrance was much less grand than I anticipated, but no less surprising. Rheingold lifted his gun from the judge’s head and pointed it at us, just long enough for his goons to grab us.
“Just in time to help me with my appeal, Gumshoe.”
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Always makes me laugh. “You’re pregnant? How did that happen?”
“The usual way, dumbass. Or didn’t your parents have The Talk with you?” 😁
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Folly to leave now. If someone came to kick her out, she would be wisest to sleep now to prepare for that hour. She laid out her blankets, crawled into bed, and doused the light.
She had food and shelter. What was that saying? Content was the true philosopher’s stone.
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Sparing the company some pain, he gave only the punch line: “Silly rabbi, kicks are for Trids!”
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JOINT BREVITY WORDS PUBLICATION
APP-7(E)
NATO UNCLASSIFIED, p36
KICK (Degrees RH/LH or heading) – a defensive check turn in a specified direction.
“Grumpy Three Zero, Bandsaw: KICK 240, GATE,” called the AWACS controller, her calm voice starting to show the stress of directing the task force’s fighters against a frigging alien invasion. “Uh oh,” Bill said to himself, as he rolled his F/A-48 and pulled hard left while pushing his throttles through the detents to full afterburner, steadying on heading 240.
“Grumpy Three Zero, Green WEST, TWO BANDITS HOT EAST closing, range 40, BUSTER.”
Bill pulled his throttles back to mil power. Okay, the bad…lizards, bugs, or whatever they were… were moving towards him from the east. He still had two AMRAAMs and a sidewinder but he was getting low on gas. That GREEN call told him there was a way out to his west, at least for now.
The weird thing about the alien invasion to Bill was that the aliens were actually pretty poorly equipped. They obviously got here from another star, so their space tech was way better than humanity’s, but their in-atmosphere fighters were basically at or below peer level. Their range was better since they probably used dilithium or kryptonite or something as fuel instead of jet-A, and they had lasers, but those did not punch through atmosphere very well. And their missiles were fast but not very maneuverable. Their lasers and missiles were probably great up in vacuum, but down here they were only so-so. And their radar just sucked, so he was pretty sure his jet could get fairly close thanks to it’s stealth coatings before they could track him – the aliens appeared to not have any radar absorbent tech at all, and their systems acted like they were just flummoxed by stealth.
Bill pulled through a 180 degree turn and scanned back and forth until his helmet display and the plane’s IRST identified two enemy fighters high above by their infrared signature alone. He selected his last two AMRAAMs, locked them up, and pickled them to fire. “FOX THREE, FOX THREE” he called on the frequency as they roared in sequence out of his weapons bays toward the aliens, but he didn’t sit around to watch. He rolled to pull through a diving turn and curve back west towards the safe direction his controller had called, popping only chaff, as flares seemed like they attracted the aliens attention a bit too much. He was really hoping his missiles would take those alien fighters out. If not, one short range infrared missile was all that was left in the missile bays, and then just his gun.
His AWACs controller also had not called out any friendlies lately – he hoped his squadronmates were okay. They’d been trying to fight their way back across the Pacific after the aliens started their attack last week.
The controller called out “SPLASH TWO, Grumpy Three Zero is clear, GREEN WEST.”
Bill turned and looked on his datalink feed for the location of the boat. Maybe he would actually survive another day of the alien invasion after all.
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“Tonight’s football game is against Michigan State. Kickoff’s at 7PM, and Jase Vincinte’s quarterback.”
Sergei started to look excited, then blinked in confusion. Then I remembered that “football” for him would be what we called soccer. The gridiron game was still enough of a puzzle that he couldn’t really enjoy it.
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Kip yelped a curse, banging his forehead on the manifold as the shock raced up his arm. That little triphasic burst was just a tickle, but it sure packed a kick. Doctor Shizuki, program manager at the Cape, had died from only a slightly larger dose of it during the module’s construction.
“Watch it, you moron!” he growled at himself. It wouldn’t do to snuff it out here near Proxima in Earth’s only hyperflight prototype. One that was currently drifting dead in space. And if Kip died on his anniversary, his wife would kill him.
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(Part 1/2)
“It’s like that old conceit from that scientific-romance writer, Robert Heinlein, about the character for ‘crisis’ being a fusion of the ones for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ — there’s more than a little possible upside, true enough, but the downside risk is also high, and for the very worst part of it that one’s quite hard to bound from above. My lady.”
Suzanne Marquardt’s voice was low and level here in the Old Withdrawing Room of Cohan Major’s Main Lodge — the family didn’t mind spelling it the English way much, except when they named their entire House, and then it was always Ceoghan — over the crackling of the oak and hickory fire (both species brought all the long way from Earth back during the Settlement, of course, along with the rest of the biosphere). She spoke matter-of-factly and direct to the head of House Ceoghan, Aileen, its sole head since she’d become a widow quite unexpectedly four years before.
“Quit that, Suzanne. At least, here at home. I didn’t make you our Fixer Plenipotentiary to butter me up with flattering language.” Aileen Ceoghan sipped from her small glass of slightly-chilled sherry. “And of course it seems to be obvious enough these days to even the ‘man on the street’ how events could, as they say, ‘spiral out of control’ all too easily. Given only further intransigent claims and posturing from the new head of House Borgia, may young Svetlana grow quickly into her role.” Another sip. “It doesn’t help, at least in that regard, how that big crowd last night all around Borgia House kept chanting ‘Burn, burn!’ Now, I do know some of the relevant details, of course, like who they were and what exactly they were all so busy saying with such earnestness and vigor, but… not very calming.”
Suzanne quirked a smile. “Not your usual crowd-with-torches, eh? Most of ’em not only Borgia but with their handhelds set to authenticate that out in the full open so anyone could know it. And of course ‘Brulez’ means in fact ‘You burn it’ not ‘Let’s burn it’ — not the same at all. My, uh.”
Aileen smiled slyly. “Old habits are hard to break, Suzanne? But I assure you when it’s just the male and female Heads in close session, there’s no bothering with all that stuff. Fine or even necessary, in an audience, to remind everyone what’s happening. But here?” Another sip. “Possibly if we do come to a consensus, and I do mean our Four Houses of course in this current, ah, danger-and-opportunity, the solution we reach might not be fully known to the public. Or perhaps even, at first, to such as you.”
Suzanne shook her head, slightly to the left. “Whatever works, as the very old saying goes. But of course, it has to work for five, not only four.”
And suddenly Aileen Ceoghan’s look got very piercing indeed. “What if any have you heard, of this talk about there being a Sixth House? And obviously I do not mean an elevation of some subsidiary or secondary House to co-equal status with our traditional Five.”
“I have heard that, rarely and quietly, my — I mean Aileen. Basically it amounts to an idea where the entire population, of citizens as they’d be called almost anywhere else, essentially joins as one as if into a single and monolithic House. Not quite some ‘body politic’ or worse ‘mob rule’ by any sort of mobile crowd or ruction, but something vaguely of the sort.
“It seems to be something of a last-ditch final resort. If ever the Houses or even one or a few of them, disregarded their own people hard enough or long enough, rather than those simply moving to another House… all might act as one. Somehow. Leaving aside the question of who would lead them in this action, or be their voice and advocate, or hear their petitions.”
Aileen drained her glass, poured another, took a small sip. “So you don’t hear then that the leader of this Sixth House would be Svetlana Borgia?” Now her voice was low and soft and purring, but also almost a cat’s growl.
Suzanne found herself… chuckling. Not only for an instant, either. Maybe from repeated requests for informality, but by far mostly from pure upwelling truth.
“Dear heavens, Aileen, that’s about the farthest thing from anyone’s mind at the moment. Except possibly core-circle Borgias, or maybe agitators for the same, who’ve been all smart enough to keep such a thing to themselves.
“There are as you know a large number of people, not only in ours but other Houses, not just in our Four but also the Borgias too, who’d be laughing out loud at anyone suggesting that, or battering him to the cold hard ground as a lesson. The patience, as you’ve alluded, is wearing thin towards threadbare. All this… tommyrot about ‘first among equals’ or as bad or worse, ‘pre-eminence’ what’er the very devil that’s meant to mean.”
“Tommyrot? Arrant nonsense? That’s how they see it, out with the people of all our Houses, the ‘citizenry’ as it’d be called offworld?” Intensely.
Suzanne spread her hands, five or so feet apart. “There’s this thing we measure sometimes, that’s borrowed from cosmology, called ‘cross-horizon coherence’ or ‘far-sync’ for short. It means, here, people far apart in some measurable way, saying the same things, thinking the same thoughts as sure as anyone could tell it. Like, outside the light cone in the universe or outside the usual channels and speed of communication here. Information diffuses among people, usually; never mind how it can go speed of light or a lot faster with a Westenra Drive involved. But it takes a certain amount of, well, jumps from one to another, to get anywhere with people. Like how light moves in a star under radiative transfer. Slow not fast.
“This is different. It’s like everyone is already thinking and then saying the same thing, as if it were occurring to them naturally. Psy-ops and the achievable influence-ops don’t do that, people won’t let them, especially on such a world as ours.” She shook her head. “Mass coherence, of itself. That’s usually the precursor to a genuine preference cascade, if there’s been enough tension and resistance to changing attitudes or actions.”
“It’s in the air, in simple language. Like that feeling before a storm.”
“Only more so. Like the charges have already separated in a cloud, and all you need is that errant cosmic ray to ionize a channel and start things up enough to self-amplify. Like a landslide, like an avalanche, like a geyser going into eruption. Positive feedback all.” Suzanne Marquardt didn’t see or hear how her own manner and voice had changed. Like some State Oracle.
And the look on Aileen Mary Ceoghan’s face was stark as a cliff face. “At that point there’s no stopping it at all. Period. Whatever the ‘it’ is.”
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(Part 2/2)
“But that’s the point. This is Marquesas, not some absurd aristo-mess like late-1700s France. There’s no… appetite, for any dumbshit Terror stuff.
“Um, my lady.” One did not say such things in Audience, ever.
“Suzanne, do what you were just doing and tell me the rest of it!”
As close to an Imperial decree as anyone on Marquesas ever came. Or could.
“This isn’t quite like a lightning discharge or an avalanche; people are conscious, after all, and volitional. But there are still ways it can go, and other ways it… can’t. No longer possible, given the… charges.”
“So the point is, to direct it along some still-possible channel. Better rather than worse, constructive not destructive. Or as close as may be.” Aileen leaned back instead of forward, sipped from her glass. “I’m going to say a word to you, so you tell me what it means in this context.” She took a closely-measured, tiny sip. “Sovereignty.”
Suzanne shrugged, still in the grip of her rare… walking-on-air. “That’s what makes our whole system tick, under the customs and the understandings and our traditions of free mutually-agreed motion between Houses. And all. We hold individuals sovereign, that each gives loyalty and support upward and downward. From the head or heads of a House” — she smiled at the Lady (and as good as Lord) of Ceoghan — “down to a street sweeper or charcoal burner of the meanest subsidiary House. It’s all relationships. Why that one particular word? I mean, it’s the right one, or one of ’em, but..?”
“Research. Going back to the turn of the millennium, at least, to someone with the remarkable nom de guerre of ‘Datarepublican’ — and long before that to its central place in old Celtic myth, and likely politics as well. There has to be such a basis, and that’s what one of our theorists said as well, Deirdriu Williams, her family’s been doing political economy since before the first Moon landing.
“So, you think our ideas and ideals of sovereignty will support — action by our Four not-Borgia Houses, to set things back on some even footing?”
Suzanne shrugged, less fiercely. “If it’s done according to the forms, as seen from the outside, yes. Especially if Miss Williams could be prevailed upon to publish this formalization of sovereignty upon Marquesas of hers?”
And Aileen smiled, brightly and like a hunting feline. “Yes, there’s some considerable work been done toward that end already. So that we can show, by her formalization, that what Svetlana Borgia is doing is… basically something of a secular social and political sin. Unconstitutional it can never be, here, not without a fixed written constitution to violate.”
“They’d never allow it. Such a thing might violate the unwritten but very well-agreed-on equivalent they already have, out there among our very not citizens — individuals, sovereign ones, as we’ve said.” Still that eerie sort of near-trance, that only Suzanne herself seemed not able to notice. “So many of our people here are suspicious of any treachery, there’s been too much of that upon Old Earth, and then lately by the Empire of Man. If one House or even all of ’em tried, our… Sixth House would forbid.”
“Is there any way you could actually… test this? Measure some sort of a gauge of their possible-likely response, to this scenario specifically?”
Suzanne smiled, no, more like beamed. “As with the 1700s Americans, there is such a thing as tavern talk here. It’s a tradition, as you well know, much like the pub-gatherings in old Britain or… well, it’s already the big topic there. ‘Sovereignty’ isn’t much heard as a term in itself, but the idea of it’s as common-currency as it gets. And before you ask, yes I am known myself at assorted ‘Old Circuit’ taverns and restaurants. Like for instance the Spit-Roasted Cow or the Pig and Poke.
“That’s in addition to all the formalized tests and so forth. Though the idea of an opinion ‘survey’ is almost as absurd, here, as a ‘psy-op’ is.” She sighed, more or less, and shook herself all over. “Sorry, it’s like somehow I really need to sit down all of a sudden. Aileen.” She even had some brief trouble arranging the duelist’s sword at her left side to sit.
“Do, I’ll pour you a nice stiff brandy.” Aileen suited action to words.
“My Lady, I mean Aileen, what did I just do? I mean, did I do it again?”
“That thing you do, falling into yourself, or into everybody? It’s one of the main few things I handed you First Fixer to get, as you ought know.” The glass she handed over could’ve filled her own little one eightfold.
And the first drink Suzanne took would’ve emptied that little glass full.
“One more question, before you ‘let down’ too much. Do we have a chance? Really and truly a real chance, to avoid some disastrous blow-up over it?”
“Yes, Aileen, we do. My intuition is yelling yes, my reason is running in a dozen directions at once on how it could and likely should be done.
“And maybe this should’ve been done a long time ago; and all we needed to do it now was just… a swift little kick, from circumstances or Providence.”
And she swerved around in her chair and fixed Aileen Ceoghan with a sharp stare of her own. “And once we get past this, if we do get past this, then Marquesas will never allow any such foolishness here, ever again.
“Whatever seeks to take or give, power above or beyond the laws — that.”
And Ceoghan’s Fixer Plenipotentiary held out her glass. To make ready to share a solemn toast with its First-in-One, and drink to precisely that.
(Based on some pre-existing setting and characters, and maybe more than a few current events.)
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