The usual caveat: it’s a very rough draft! Enjoy!

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“Sir? Captain, are you all right?”

McClaren heard the voice as if from far away, through a dull ringing in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, and was rewarded with a thousand hot needles lancing into his optic nerve. He hissed with the pain.

“It’ll pass in a minute, captain,” the voice said again, closer this time. Chief Harkness. “You must’ve gotten a big jolt,” she went on quietly, her hand on his shoulder. Her touch felt very warm. “Fucking alien bitches,” she suddenly spat.

He smiled grimly. Whatever had happened to the ship, he was glad Harkness had made it. This far, at least.

“How many,” he asked her, squinting up into her worried face. “Do you know how many of the crew…are okay?”

For a moment she didn’t answer, but looked up at someone else. His eyes followed her and found Amundsen, kneeling at his other side.

“Twenty-three survivors, sir,” he said quietly. “Including yourself.”

McClaren couldn’t hide his shock. “Twenty-three? Out of a crew of two hundred eight?” They helped him sit up. The aliens had gathered the human survivors in Aurora’s main galley.

Amundsen was only grateful that it hadn’t been the lower galley where he had been forced to abandon Raj Kumar. The ship’s XO was not among the survivors, and Amundsen had seen enough in the rest of the ship to know what must have happened to him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone else is…” He shook his head slowly.

Read the rest of Chapter 3 >>

Keep in mind that this is just a very rough draft, but this is what the second chapter looks like at this point…

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Amundsen knew that he would probably receive a court-martial for abandoning his post in the face of the enemy. But he had few doubts that any of the crew, particularly himself, would survive long enough to have to worry about such technicalities.

While he was the survey section leader, his assigned jump – and battle – station wasn’t in the survey module itself, but in the main damage control point just forward of and two decks below the bridge. Amundsen was a “plank owner” of the Aurora, having been with the ship since she was launched, and in addition to being a first-rate astronomer, he was also an engineer who had intimate knowledge of the ship’s systems. His job was to help the XO manage the ship’s damage control parties during any sort of emergency, and to act as something of an insurance policy for the ship during its many hyperspace jumps.

The compartment they were in, which in everyday use served as the lower crew galley, had one peculiarity that was shared by only a few other compartments in the ship: it had a real viewport, a window to the universe outside the ship, and not just a video display.

After the inexplicable electrical hurricane had swept through the ship, killing all the electrical systems and leaving Aurora’s crew in darkness without gravity, Amundsen had pushed himself over to the viewport to look outside. He could see the huge alien warship off of Aurora’s bow. His eyes, which reflected more anger now than fear, took in the thing’s smoothly curving flank, which was adorned with great runes that stretched from the pointed prow toward the slim-waisted stern. He guessed that the ship must be at least four, if not five, kilometers long. It would have been a beautiful marvel of engineering if its purpose had not been so openly malevolent.

Read the rest of Chapter 2 >>

I’m just about halfway through (actually, a bit further) the first draft of my latest book, In Her Name: First Contact. While there’s obviously a lot of work left to do, both to finish the initial draft and then begin the oh-so-fun editing process, I wanted to give interested readers a sneak peek or two at what’s coming.

Below is a snippet of the first draft, followed by a link to a PDF file for the remainder of the chapter. Please keep in mind as you’re reading that this is the very first draft! So it may be a bit rough around the edges. Enjoy!

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Commander Owen McClaren was extremely tense, although a casual observer would never have thought so. The captain of the survey vessel TNS Aurora was one of the best in the fleet, and to his crew he had never appeared anything but calm and cool. Even when one of the ship’s newly refitted reactors had suffered a breach during their last run into drydock, McClaren’s deep voice had never wavered, his fatherly face had never betrayed a hint of fear or apprehension as he personally directed the engineering watch to contain the breach. A man of unusual physical and moral courage, he was the perfect captain for the exploratory missions the Aurora and her sister ships mounted into deep space in search of new homes for humanity.

For McClaren, though, jumps were different. He had made thousands of jumps in his twenty-year career, but every single one was like the very first: as the transpace sequence countdown wound down to zero, his heart began to pound. It wasn’t fear that made him tense, although there were certainly enough things that could go wrong with a jump to make fear a natural enough reaction.

No, what made the forty-three-year-old former middleweight boxing champion of the Terran Naval Academy tightly grip the arms of his command chair wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. To Aurora’s captain, every jump, particularly out here in deep space, was a winning lottery ticket, the discovery of a lifetime. No matter where the Aurora wound up, as long as she arrived safely, there was bound to be a wealth of astrogational information to help human starships navigate ever further from the epicenter of Man’s origins: Earth. And on rare occasions, precious jewels – habitable planets – were to be found. McClaren was currently the survey fleet’s leading “ace,” with twelve habitable planets to his credit in return for nearly fifteen years of ship-time, sailing through uncharted space…

Read the rest of chapter one >>