“I liked her,” the doctor said as she leaned back into the pod. “Let’s see if you’ll start.”
She was no longer talking to Gunny, having found a home among the high technology that was the Lee Development Project.
The pod hummed to life. Gunny cheered and it was picked up by others nearby until everyone was cheering. Doctor Carroll climbed from the pod and took a bow before shutting it down. She pulled another part from a nearby rack and started working on a second pod.
“As soon as this one’s ready, what do you say we take these for a spin? They come pre-programmed. Nothing like a quick trip to the moon to get the blood pumping.
“Are you serious?” Gunny asked, turning to look at the robot. He signaled for Gunny to go. Lucas and Buck both shrugged.
The doctor waited for Gunny to get in before she briefed him on the few controls that he’d need for the flight. He easily ran through a diagnostic sequence. “Seems simple enough.”
She climbed into the first pod, tapped away and then gave Gunny the thumbs up. Both screens closed. The pods rotated back until an iris-style door retracted in the roof. The tube beyond was smooth. Doctor Carroll maneuvered the pod into position and shot up the tube and into the skies over Juneau. Gunny kept his hands to himself as his pod followed the first one through the sky and into space.
He was happy seeing the view outside the pod. Doctor Carroll was happy encased in technology. And together, they were headed to the moon.
The End of Cruiseliner Hades 7
A game played at GaryCon X by Craig Martelle, Guy Martelle, Stephen A. Lee, James M. Ward, Eddie Jonas, Nathaniel Y. Sims, Paul Bachleda, Jamie Soule, and David Arellano memorialized into a fiction story by Craig Martelle.
If you liked the story, please leave a review – those mean a lot to me personally. I like to see that people enjoyed the story. All proceeds from this story go to James M. Ward to offset those ugly medical bills, but we’ll work to knock them down a little at a time.
77 Worlds
From the minds of James M. Ward and Stephen Lee comes the best post-apocalyptic role-playing rules. Using the exclusive Ward Card System, players can be any of a number of characters, exploring the three domes on the moon or traveling to planet Earth where Earth Prime supplement sets the stage for a lifetime of adventure.
A wide range of 77 Worlds modules and game aids can be found online at Fireside Creations.
firesidecreations.com/77worlds
The Free Trader
The series that started it all.
A cat and his human minions fight to bring peace to humanity. On a distant planet, one group of adventurers find more than they expected in their search for Old Tech.
"Well written with a good story. Our hero is a young human 'trader' on a distant planet. The human civilization was destroyed, by war, hundreds of years ago, and our young explorer is driven to learn the secrets of the past. Along his journey, he accumulates an eclectic group of intelligent animal companions, who become dedicated to his cause." Amazon 5-Star Review
"I loved the story. Couldn't wait to turn the page to see what was going to happen next. The different beings are detailed enough so I got a good mental picture of them but not so much that it didn't leave enough room for my imagination. I'm looking forward to reading more about the characters and where their trip leads them." Amazon 5-Star Review
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MAYQR63/ref=series_rw_dp_sw
Free Trader of Warren Deep
Chapter 1
‘Ass!’
“You are such an ass!” Braden lay by the fire in the blanket he’d been using since he was a child. The young man’s long braid was wrapped around his neck like a scarf. He looked at the Hillcat, a scowl darkening his face.
‘It makes noises but no sense,’ the ‘cat responded over their mindlink. The ‘cat’s orange back, even with a man’s knee, had black dots and a black slash toward his tail. He was called a Hellcat by those who’d seen him make a kill, but not by Braden, his most loyal friend.
When he was a child, Braden saved a Hillcat kitten from drowning. At that moment they bonded, and instantly, Braden knew he had a lifelong partner. Many called the joining the ultimate pairing of friendship and joy.
It hadn’t taken long before Braden’s bond with the ‘cat felt like the relationship his parents had. Together their entire adult lives - annoyance, bickering, surrender, friendship, then more bickering, and intertwined throughout was a fierce loyalty. The old man would say anything about his partner, but if anyone else said something, the fight was on. Braden called the ‘cat an ass ten times a turn of the sun, but they fought their enemies together. They were there for each other.
And so it was, the relationship between a Hillcat called Golden Warrior of the Stone Cliffs, or simply G-War as Braden called him. The Hillcat had his own name, but even after ten cycles of the seasons, he hadn’t told Braden what it was. He insisted that Braden wasn’t mature enough to know his true ‘cat name.
As Braden glared at the ‘cat, G-War raised one paw in his mocking way of giving Braden the finger. The ‘cat turned around a couple times, sniffing the air, then faced away from the young man and dropped to the ground. G-War’s head was up, sphinxlike, his eyes closed. The ‘cat cut their link.
The ‘cat listened in on Braden’s thoughts, but Braden only ‘heard’ what the ‘cat wanted him to hear.
“I hate it when you do that,” Braden retorted, but knew that he could sleep now, without fear of surprise, as he did every night when the 'cat watched over him. Without G-War, Braden would have never survived his life as a Free Trader in Warren Deep.
Click here for the Free Trader Series page on Amazon.
Cygnus Rising
Humanity Returns to Space
Cygnus Space Opera – Book 1
A Tale from the Free Trader Universe
Click here for the Cygnus Space Opera series page on Amazon.
Keep reading for a Sample Chapter of Cygnus Rising
Chapter 1 - Fire!
Flames shot through the open hatch. Cain yelled, “Engineering’s on fire!” as the klaxons continued to scream, echoing down the corridor away from him. He sensed, more than heard the anguished cry.
The hatch was open. The automated fire suppression system had failed.
He ripped open the damage control panel and pulled the tank out. He threw it hastily over his shoulder, reached behind him with a well-practiced maneuver to start the flow of air, and wrapped the dangling mask across his face. He draped the fire hood over his head as he ran. He didn’t have time to put on the whole outfit. People he knew were dying.
He hit the flames of the doorway at a dead run. The intense heat scorched his bare forearms as he passed. He yelled into his mask as he slid to a stop in the middle of the space, looking for survivors. A Rabbit lay under a terminal, an ugly scorch mark cut across his white fur, leaving blackened hair around burned pink flesh underneath. The Rabbit moved – Briz was alive.
Cain slid him from under the melting terminal. The Rabbit was dense and blocky, half Cain’s height, but the same weight. Cain pulled an equipment cover off the back of a chair. He took it and wrapped it around the Rabbit’s head and over as much of his body as he could, then hefted him, trying not to touch the injury. Cain lumbered toward the hatch, ducked his head, held his breath, and jumped through the flames. He deposited the Rabbit in the passageway and raced back into Engineering. Ellie was in there somewhere.
He should have been alarmed that the flames didn’t seem to hurt as much this time. The next victim was a Wolfoid, horribly torn apart from the force of an exploded containment vessel. He saw something odd about the way the Wolfoid’s body, bigger than a human’s was laying on the floor.
A pink-fleshed hand snaked out from underneath the heavy gray fur. Without remorse, Cain heaved the Wolfoid’s shattered body to the side. Ellie was dazed, but seemed to be okay. The Wolfoid must have taken the full force of the rupture, protecting her. Cain�
�s breath caught as he looked at her silken black hair, the ends curled and brittle from the heat that had passed over her.
He pulled her to him as blue lights started to flash within Engineering, signaling the imminent flooding of argon gas into the compartment. He kneeled, rolling her from a sitting position over his shoulder. He stood without much effort. She wasn’t heavy and laid easily over his shoulder as he hurried for the hatch. The flames had died down somewhat, but he still ran through, hoping speed would keep them safe. Once through, he stopped, took off his hood and breathed deeply of the better air in the corridor. The hatch to engineering closed.
The klaxons stopped as someone helped Ellie from his shoulder. He looked at the closed hatch. Anyone still in the space would be denied oxygen, just like the fire. The argon gas was supposed to be flushed in a matter of seconds, but it would be too late. He was surprised that he didn’t know how many people worked in the space. Three? Four?
“Holy Rising Star, Cain! You shouldn’t have gone in there. Why the hell would you do something like that?” the Captain’s words were harsh, but his eyes were grateful. As the older man looked at the two survivors in the corridor, he added, “but I’m glad you did, son. Looks like you saved two lives, irreplaceable lives.”
The two Hillcats waiting for Cain and Ellie in the corridor couldn’t have agreed more. Carnesto yowled in pain as Ellie came back to her senses. The burns on her lower body attacked her with waves of agony. He put a furry paw on her head to help her through the worst of it.
Why had Cain risked knowing what his death would do to his ‘cat, to his family? He had no choice. It’s who he’d always wanted to be. It’s who he was. He’d spent his short life trying to live up to one man, the Space Exploration Service Captain who showed him how a hero acts.
Free Trader 8 – The Great Cat Rebellion & Free Trader 9 – Return to the Traveler.
Coming soon…
In The Great Cat Rebellion, the Free Trader is caught between his friends and the ease with which man fights against himself. Free Trader Book Eight – coming soon, exclusively on Amazon.
In Return to the Traveler, the Free Trader returns to space and finds that their last trip to the Traveler only energized the masses, creating a new vacuum for the enemies of mankind to fill.
Postscript
If you like this story, please join my mailing list by dropping by my website www.craigmartelle.com or if you have any comments, shoot me a note at [email protected]. I am always happy to hear from people who’ve read my work. I try to answer every email I receive.
Please write a short review for me on Amazon. I greatly appreciate any kind words, even one or two sentences go a long way. The number of reviews an ebook receives greatly improves how well an ebook does on Amazon.
Amazon – www.amazon.com/author/craigmartelle
Facebook – www.facebook.com/authorcraigmartelle
My web page – www.craigmartelle.com
Thank you for reading!
Author Notes
The idea for running a game and then writing a story from it came to me during GaryCon IX. I floated the idea with Stephen Lee and Jim Ward, and they said it had never been done before.
Never say never. Stephen did the leg work and the incredible GaryCon scheduling committee delivered the first spot of the show to me.
Then I got worried. I was going to have to deliver on the idea. I was at an author’s convention in Las Vegas and Stephen attended. We did a trial run of the scenario and thank goodness! We found a couple weak spots, which have been remedied. It also allowed me to brush up on my game-mastering skills. In order to make it easiest for myself, I used the scenario that I wrote for Stephen and Jim’s 77 Worlds Kickstarter – originally titled Doom in the Ruins of Juneau, later retitled to the more positive Rise of Juneau.
It was the 12th of a twelve-pack of scenarios, and in it, we needed a way for the players to conquer the world and get back to space. Thanks to some tips and hints from Stephen and Jim, we put it all together. I wrote it as if I were writing one of my novels, so it came in a little bit longer than your average scenario.
Okay. It was a lot longer!
For players like me who grew up a long way from other gamers, I liked long scenarios where I could read and enjoy playing the game within my mind. Like we showed at GaryCon X, it’s fun when you can game an involved scenario with others.
March 11th, 2018 marks one year and five days that I have been within Amazon’s top 100 science fiction authors. I’m humbled by that and hope I can maintain that momentum. I have some incredible fans and friends who are supportive.
They still think I was a bit whacked to commit to writing a full novel in two and a half days, but I had everything in place, including writing some of the story ahead of time. So it wasn’t that overwhelming. I had to become more of a scribe than an author. I didn’t have to make anything up, only keep the dialogue flowing as it happened during the game. In any case, it was nice to write ‘The End’ and get that last bit to my editor for a final pass before uploading to Amazon.
My hope is that with a little push, we can get into the right categories that will give us a scifi sub-genre bestseller. I want the players to join me as bestselling authors.
And I want the book to sell a few copies because the proceeds go to Jim Ward to offset some of his medical bills from his ongoing battle with diabetes.
In any case, it took a total of 16 hours to document what was a fun game. The players got along well and everyone participated. It made for an easier story to write. 22,000 words over the course of 27 hours, start to finish, including 10 hours of sleep, we have a novella. I really hope that people like the story.
I want to thank James Osiris Baldwin for working overnight to give me a complete edit of this story and then the best beta readers in the world, Micky Cocker, Kelly O’Donnell, and Jim Caplan. They keep me honest. My brother Guy who had a number of ideas to help make the story better and I think they worked well.
Stephen Lee has been monumentally and massively supportive with this effort, from the beginning, last year at GaryCon IX when I first floated the idea. He presented it to Luke Gygax. Together we made the pitch to the committee and here we are, a year later, with not only the game in the bag, but a book about it.
The players got into the game well. I could not have asked for a better group. It was a perfect slice of reality. They took a little to gel, but when they did, they started to kick some serious ass. The players, Stephen A. Lee, Eddie Jonas, Nathaniel Y. Sims, Paul Bachleda, Jamie Soule, and David Arellano. Amaze balls, you guys!
And since this is the 21st Century, how about a couple pictures of the game in play and the players!
Those are the most exciting action shots we have from the game! Thank you Eddie Jonas for the happy snaps. He was only able to get them when not much was going on. The best interactions were the rapid fire dialogue. I greatly enjoyed the game, but that was because the players made it what it was.
What else do I write?
I call the Free Trader my flagship series. It is my science fiction adventure series that I can escape to. I wrote it because I’m a fan of the roleplaying games designed by James M. Ward – Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World. That’s why the ship in this one is called the Warden, in honor of my friend Jim Ward.
I have a number of series. A follow-on to the Free Trader is the Cygnus Space Opera set within the Free Trader universe. The Terry Henry Walton Chronicles is 16 books strong and set with the Kurtherian Gambit Universe. Terry takes his people to space in The Bad Company, another space opera follow-on.
I wrote the End Times Alaska series, about post-apocalyptic survival. That four-book series is published by Permuted Press and carried by Simon & Schuster. That makes me a hybrid author – I have four books with a traditional publishing house and the rest of my library is self-published.
I write the Darklanding series with Scott Moon. These are Firefly meets Tombstone, a space western written as episodes. Ou
r hope is to shop this to Hollywood. It’s a good series with a sheriff, his alien deputy, and all the action one spaceport can’t handle.
I have one Thriller – People Raged and the Sky Was on Fire, a pseudo-autobiography. I think it might be the best book I ever wrote, but it never sold well. Such is the authoring business, but most of my other stuff sold really well. I like that a lot. I have a long list of short stories that I’ve published, too. I make those available on Amazon. Victoria Cooper hooked me up with some great branding to give them a retro vibe. With one glance, anyone can tell one of my short stories.
Some writers who have influenced me? Robert E. Howard (the original Conan), JRR Tolkien, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Lin Carter, Brian Aldiss, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Anne McCaffrey, and of late, James Axler, Raymond Weil, Jonathan Brazee, Mark E. Cooper, and David Weber. I learned something from each of these authors, story line, compelling issue, characters that you can relate to, the beauty of the prose, unique tendrils weaving through the book’s theme. My writing has been compared to that of Andre Norton and my Free Trader characters to those of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders, my Rick Banik Thrillers to the works of Robert Ludlum.
I find the comparisons humbling and continue to improve the quality of my stories. All I want is for my readers to relate to the characters, put themselves into those situations, and ask themselves, what would they do if they were there instead?
Through a bizarre series of events, I ended up in Fairbanks, Alaska. I never expected to retire to a place where golf courses are only open for four months out of the year. But I love it here. It is off the beaten path. My wife and I watch the northern lights from our driveway. Our dog has lots of room to run. And temperatures reach forty below zero. We have from three and a half hours of daylight in the winter to twenty-four hours in the summer.
Cruiseliner Hades 7: A Lost 77 Worlds Tale Page 7
