Sometimes it’s fun to go back and look at the original version of something. The very first page of the very first draft. Today’s first pages are from BODIES IN MOTION, and it’s nothing like the final draft. Enjoy!
Selena Caryll poured over the maps of unclaimed land with two cyber-readers in front of her. Groundsider technology and starsiders technology worked together as well the two warring factions of humanity currently stranded five-hundred light years from the Mother Empire of Glissan so she was forced to read grounder law for land sales, purchase, and mineral rights on the clunky beast of cy-reader she’d bought in Groundside Tarrin, and read the precedence of purchase, gravity-well living, and imperial fleet regulations on the one she’d scrounged in the enclave.
Neither worked with the computers installed in the OIA offices.
Selena Caryll pushed back from her desk. From day one she’d known there were three options if she wanted to avoid war: make the fleet accept grounder life either here or on Malakin 4 if a terraforming protocol could be established, find a new fuel source that would work with the engines of vessels that were over five-hundred years old, or find a new form of starship that didn’t rely on the rare orun crystals to fly.
All the options were equally impossible and staring at land she couldn’t purchase that had metals she couldn’t process wasn’t changing anything.
With a growl she looked at the clock. It was far too early to go home, too late on the islands for her to call and wheedle another visit to stare down into the abyssal waters at the unreachable orun, and too unlikely that someone from the other offices of the OIA would stop by to gossip. That would require someone here to like her. Since she’d sent all the men packing, not interested in being their pity lay, and since she had nothing of interest to offer the women she was universally avoided.
Closing her eyes, she brought her implant online and did a scan of the star system. Six planets circled the sun like slow-moving sharks in the silence of the void. Today the chatter between ships and the raucous noise of the orbital station were all silent. Something red pinged in the distant orbit around Malakin 4, the broken distress beacon of a ship destroyed years before she was born. Selena opened her eyes, looked out the window at the OIA courtyard, and decided it was time for an early lunch.
No amount of research, reports, studies, or persuasion was going to change centuries of prejudice codified into galactic resource law.
For that she would need a baseball bat and about five minutes with a few key people.
She used her implant to transport to Groundsider Tarrin and found a tiny little bookstore with a coffee bar and decided to test her theory that no one would notice her absence. If doing nothing got the same results as working a nine-hour day she was more than willing to spend those nine hours reading the latest Latisha Riggs novel while trying the range of lattes and smoothies available. In a few decades, when the stubborn mules currently leading both governments were ready to budge, she’d go back to work
At the back of her mind she suspected someone would come find her. She felt guilty at a genetic level. Starsiders were born to a crew, and the died with their crew, and every day in between they worked with their crew for the betterment of humankind.
She bought her smoothie and glanced over her shoulder expecting to see Perrin striding up to demand to know why she wasn’t in her office. Or cold-eyed, bronze-haired Hollis Silar – Carver’s second-in-command – would walk up from the Starguard department to ask her for lunch. After one lackluster dinner together in the Academy she’d done her best to avoid him, but if he wasn’t in a relationship, he was looking.
Selena sat down and checked her com messages, expecting Hermione Marshall to call with land right questions as she struggled to find housing for Starsiders like Selena who had no ship to call home.
Nothing. Not a ping. Not carbon copied message for her files. Not even a notice about the weekly OIA luncheon that she was somehow, mysteriously, never invited to.
There was no word in any language she knew for the emptiness one felt being completely and utterly alone when surrounded by a city full of people, but she wished there were. It would be nice if just once someone needed her.
Sighing, she shifted in her seat to stay in the shade of the ferny leaves of a mimosa tree. Reality was sorely disappointing, but Latisha Rigg’s novel about an islander who rescued a lost woman with amnesia would more than make up for it. Fiction was the best escape hatch in the galaxy.
Read the real first chapter HERE