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I was unable to locate a picture of said author so I will start off with her book cover.
Book Blurb:
Ever since Sky Captain Lemise Holdif was a boy, he’s been faced with
the End of Days. For decades an unknown enemy has been systematically wiping
out life in the galaxy, starting with the most advanced societies. Now Arcadia,
a world built from the trash of an entire galaxy, is the only planet left
capable of distant space travel, and the next target. Lemise is desperate to
save his home world, but his plans are interrupted when an alien visitor
transports onto his ship. Lead Specialist Paelae Madison is the last of her
kind. The only survivor of the First Attack, and bent on revenge for the
destruction of her people. In desperation, she teleports onto an Arcadian ship
and offers aid in the coming war. Arcadia sees her as a hero, but Lemise is
weary to trust a stranger who’s survived over five hundred previous battles.
Together the two fight to defeat an enemy far more advanced, and far more
cunning than Arcadia has ever known. But extinction lurks around every corner,
and The Enemy isn’t the only one threatening to destroy the world.
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Buy Links:
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/482154
About the Author:
Hope Christine was born in Arizona and raised in Colorado. Her youth
was spent in Narnia and her teenage years in Middle-Earth. Like most, she grew
up with reluctance and then attended college for multiple degrees before
settling on Linguistics.
Today she studies Middle-Eastern languages and works in retail.
She’s opinionated, blunt, loves to bike, and bares an extreme hate of
peaches.
Contact the Author:
Arcadia is a junkyard planet but it collects more than just
broken ships. Before it was a recognized planet, it had been a place of refuge
for lost voyagers. Eventually it began to collect people like it collected
trashed technology. Some were refugees, others were stranded after running out
of money for their journey, and some were simply shunned from their own worlds.
With so many different people there’s a lot of borrowed
pieces of culture that has been meshed together to form the Arcadian way of
life. For example: they love to refurbish or repurpose technology but it is the
highest crime of their court systems to help create or aide in the creation of
cyborgs: part human, part technology. Don’t
improve what man did not make.
The law developed from their belief that a soul cannot find
the World Beyond unless the body is whole. It makes navigating the Field of
Stars, a type of purgatory, difficult because a partial soul would have to wait
for a whole soul to help guide them. This belief was stolen from the Monks on
the planet Maldeen who had a very different lifestyle, rarely traveling into
space.
Paelae is the outsider on Arcadia, she comes from a more
crisp and clean way of traveling space. It’s like taking Captain Picard and
putting him on the Serenity. She has
a hard time adjusting to their way of life but as you read it from her
perspective you begin to pick up on where all those bits and pieces of Arcadian
society came from.
Lemise, who is born on Arcadia and has had little contact
with other races (since most just fire at them for scavenging the graves of the
dead) sees Paelae’s past life on the Imladian ships as very excessive and
wasteful. In this way, as well as others, they tend to clash.
As the story progresses you can really see how Paelae’s and
Lemise’s culture begin to shape who they become from a young age.
Despite the cramped space, the other
women gave her a reasonable berth, some eying her while checking their weapons.
Had she screamed in her sleep? The
nights had grown increasingly rare when she didn’t have a nightmare.
“Hey.” Paelae sat up and tugged the
clothes out of her trunk. She ran a hand over the purple and black jumpsuit
provided for her; it felt wrong, wearing the colors of another people. It was
the first time anyone offered her a uniform. She preferred the Imladian one; it
was familiar.
“Hey.” This time she looked up,
noticing that the one-word sentence had been directed to her.
A woman stood at the end of her bed,
arms crossed and legs apart as if at ease. “Name’s Benni. I’m your guard.”
Of course, the woman from the ship.
Benni was a head shorter than Paelae
and bore the markings of a low rank.
“I’m Paelae,” she said and stood to
greet Benni with a hard stare. “I’m your…” She searched for an appropriate
word.
“Ally,” Benni finished for her. “Sky
cap’s waiting outside for you.”
Paelae took the cue and began her
attempt to navigate out of the barracks, jumping over beds and weaving around
people until she reached the metal door. Outside, the world was tainted purple
as the sun filtered through Arcadia’s atmospheric shielding, a product of too
many chemical bombs. What had once been a rushed patch job to keep air on the
planet had since evolved into a last line of defense worthy of acknowledgment.
It was one of few things Arcadians boasted about among the planets—when the
planets still existed.
Captain Lemise stood just outside
the barrack doors, looking across the miles of asphalt designated for
intergalactic travel. Bordering the west side of the airfield and encroaching
fast upon the north, were piles of rejected technology and broken spaceships
tossed out by hundreds of different races.
That’s how Arcadia had started, as a
junkyard, but then lost voyagers found a home on it, attracting others—from
those shunned by their own people to travelers broken down with no funds to
continue on their journey. Eventually, it became a home for those who had
nowhere else to go, and scavenging became more than an act of survival; it
became a trade.
Most of the north and east were
surrounded by low-class, brick apartment buildings, meant for the soldiers and
their families.
“You’re not in uniform.” Lemise
deduced upon seeing her. “If you want on my Chasers, you wear my uniform.”
Paelae shrugged. “Bathroom line was
too long to change.”
Lemise began to walk away. “Then
wake up earlier.”
Paelae walked close behind with
Benni in tow as the sky captain began to explain. “Miss Demitri is our chief
innovation and engineering specialist; with a screwdriver and a handful of
computer chips, she could change a toaster into an engine. You will work beside
her under close supervision. I want a particle shield by the end of the week.”
She almost laughed. Particle shields
were difficult with the right materials, but with makeshift metals and
roundabout wiring, he would be lucky if it turned on in three weeks.
“In exchange, you will work beside
me in the evenings,” he continued.
Lemise didn’t expand any further on
her evening expectations, but Paelae suspected they would be dull at best until
Lemise began to trust her better.
“Unless there are complications.
Then I will jettison you out of an airlock in EWAN territory. Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Centuries of
military training had drilled the habit into her.
He led them to a jeep, and another
soldier drove them east to a warehouse that stood ten stories tall. Behind it,
a mesh, wire gate separated civilian from soldiers. Paelae watched as a group
of young boys tossed a ball back and forth to each other, running down a
deserted street to throw it in a trash can.
They used to play a similar game on
the cityship as trainees. It was one of the few bits and pieces they had
smuggled from the Earthen culture, played in secret when the officers had left.
Once, General Amir had caught them
midgame when he came to get Paelae for sparring lessons. Anything Earthen was
not to be spoken of or remembered in any way, but she had been rebellious as
all teenagers were those days. Everyone had frozen in place. The terror
coursing through their bodies made them forget to even salute. Trying to run
would have been devastating.
Amir had walked between them,
assessing the trainees. He had been furious, but his anger hadn’t been
displayed in shouting or beating; it had filled the silence that spread between
moments in time.
“Madison,” he addressed with a calm,
collected demeanor, turning to look
at her. “Why do we not register Earth as a planet in our systems?”
She didn’t reply.
“Madison!” This time the words were
forceful, bringing her back from the past. Lemise and Benni had already departed
from the vehicle and waited for her.
With a sigh, she shook the memory
away, letting it dissipate into the morning air and jumped out of the jeep.
Lemise led them through an open
garage door. Inside, the warehouse resembled a miniature junkyard. As Paelae
looked closer, she could tell that the piles had been organized to some degree.
One had wire, another had chips, and a third was weaponry.
“Demitri!” Lemise called. A clatter
of metal followed, and the sky captain took that as a cue. They wove in and out
of large piles and then climbed over smaller ones until the ground could be
seen again. A giant square of cleared floor sat under an open roof, and near
the opposite end, a young woman drew up schematics on a metalwork table.
“Demitri,” Lemise called again as
they walked up to her.
Demitri glanced up through layers of
grease stains and smudges of dirt. Bright red hair fell in a tangled mess past
her shoulders, held back by a set of goggles. Deep, blue crescents were visible
beneath her eyes, as if the woman had been bruised.
“Did you sleep here last night?” He
didn’t address her as a soldier, nor did she wear a uniform. Instead, brown
overalls adorned her skeletal frame, and a belt of odd tools kept it hanging
up.
Demitri gave him a confused look.
“No. I’ve only just arrived.”
“You were supposed to be in an hour
ago,” Lemise said as the military eased back into his speech.
“I was delayed,” she said and threw
her arms open. “It’s not like I don’t stay past midnight anyway. Every genius
needs sleep. Is this the Imladian?”
Lemise pinched the bridge of his
nose and took a deep breath. “This is Madison.”
Demitri stepped around the table and
snatched Paelae’s arm up, pushing back the black leather sleeve. After a
moment, Demitri let out a whistle. “That’s a particle shield all right. I’ll
need the big guns for those supplies.”
“One week,” Lemise said.
Demitri laughed before realizing he
was serious. “Two weeks, sleep, free meals, and you throw in that glass plating
I need to fix the Mirage.”
“One week, no sleep, free breakfast,
and you fix the Mirage because it’s
your job, not a bargaining chip.”
“Two weeks, no sleep, and lunches.”
“A week and a half, sleep, and no
food.”
Demitri was about to throw in
another bargain when a little girl ran out from behind a pile of piping. She
held up a colored picture with evident pride, tugging on Demitri’s pants and
grunting to get her attention.
“A week and a half, no sleep, and
forget this happened,” Demitri said as she placed a hand on her daughter’s
head. “The daycare was filled, and Pops is working cross-continent. I wouldn’t
bring her unless it was my only option, I swear.”
Lemise knelt down to the girl’s
level. “Hello, Demi.” He smiled.
Demi held up her picture of colorful
stick figures, grunting as she pointed in stunted movements at each one.
“I see.” Lemise took her picture and
gave it a further inspection. “It is a beautiful picture. Will you draw me
one?”
Paelae watched in mild horror. Demi
was broken. On the cityship, they considered it a mercy to chloroform such children
at birth, if they made it that far without detection; and it shocked her that
all those years she never thought twice about it. Never before had she
encountered one on other planets, though she’d heard stories.
Lemise stood, turning back to
Demitri. “Will she be okay around new faces?”
“Yeah, she’s better with it now.”
Demitri cracked her knuckles in anticipation.
“A week and a half, no sleep, and
lunches,” he offered.
“Deal.”
They shook on it.
“I’ll leave you to it then,” Lemise
said and left, disappearing behind piles of trash.
Demitri pulled a chair up for her
daughter to continue drawing, and then lounged back in one of her own.
“You named her after yourself,”
Paelae stated when the silence had extended beyond comfort.
“Of course I did. She’s a Devonian.”
Demitri fiddled with the lenses on her goggles.
Paelae nodded, though she didn’t
know what that meant. “Should we get started, then?”
Demitri tossed her a pencil. “Copy
your arm, please.”
She looked at the writing instrument
with amusement. Once, this had been the only way to transcribe thoughts, but it
had been centuries since she used one. “I don’t know how to use this.”
That caught Demitri’s attention.
“You don’t know how to use a pencil?”
“Not anymore, no.”
Demitri laughed. “Aliens, sometimes
you get too advanced for your own good. Come here. I’ll do it.” Another pencil
was pulled from the depths of her ponytail. “Please tell me you can at least
use a welder.”
Hope is pleased to present to you this excerpt from her book. Hope you enjoyed it and will take a look at her book and buy a copy.
Buy Links:
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/482154
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