Welcome to the 7th annual A to Z Blog Challenge in April!
Come back daily for more exciting posts and even some giveaways!
Today is J for Planet Janitor...
Welcome to author Chris Stevenson, whose latest "space opera" book has the fantastical, intriguing title of Planet Janitor: Custodian to the Stars.... (Don't forget to check out the contest at the end!)
About the Book:
Captain Zachary
Crowe and his crew deem themselves custodians of the stars. Their job: to
handle environmental clean-ups and close system jumps to collect precious ores
and space trash. The problem is they have yet to complete an assignment without
a mishap to add to their not so stellar record. Scraping the bottom of the
barrel, Orion Industries contracts Planet Janitor for a clandestine operation that
no one else wants, offering them more money than they could spend in three
lifetimes.
What they find on Tau Ceti will rattle their wits, test their courage,
and threaten their very survival. Included are two Planet Janitor short stories.
Excerpt:
The screen view
changed. Zaz looked up to see outside camera shots transmitted by the crawler.
He toggled the controls, increasing the size of the image on the screen.
Samantha blinked when she saw the detail.
A large rope-like
structure, the coil, could be seen embedded in the bottom of the hull. It was
as big as a sewer conduit, full of super-voltage filament fed by the gravity
repulsing generators. The camera view showed a five-by-five-foot section of the
coil. A smooth hole the size of a fist had punctured the middle the middle of
it. The edges of the impact hole showed obvious scorch marks. Whatever had hit
the line coil had done so at extreme velocity without breaking up before
penetration. Of all the places for an object to hit, the grav repulser coil
line was the worst.
Samantha slumped in her seat, interpreting the
image in a nanosecond. “We are so screwed.”
Zaz felt a warm
breath over his shoulder. Dendy stood behind him, her palms resting on his
shoulder. “We got hit, didn’t we?” she said. “That’s what you’re looking at.”
Zaz sighed. “Somehow, some when, the force-field around the hull
hiccupped and went offline. We took a strike while the shields were down, then
the force-field blinked back on again. The foreign object got us with our pants
down; we never got an auto-alarm wake-up. What are the odds of that? Anyway, it
shows a terminal disconnect. That means a power loss. We still have seventy
percent repulsion strength. As big as this ship is, with the load we’re
carrying and the planet’s gravity…well, I don’t know.”
“We could go in for a drop,
lose it and pancake,” said Samantha.
"That means we
die," said Dendy.
** Comment about your favorite sci-fi book or something fantastical to win an e-copy of Planet Janitor: Custodian to the Stars. Be sure to leave an email or way to contact you.
Huh, I might have to check this out just because of the fresh premise. Thanks!
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