by Joe Vasicek
“What seest thou?” Gulchina asked.
“I see … I see your men, getting ready to fly the ship at your command.”
“Thou seest well. Knowest though the function of this place?”
“Well, this seems to be your command chair and the men are all your officers, so it’s fairly obvious that this is the bridge.”
Gulchina grinned. “Well spoken, Reva. This is indeed my command chair, and this place is the bridge of the Temujin.”
Why did you bring me here? Reva wanted to ask. She tried to hold back, but the question must have been written fairly clearly on her face, because Gulchina only glanced at her once before guessing it.
“Thou marvelest why I have brought thee here,” she said. “Thou, the newest and nearly youngest member of my crew.”
“The question had occurred to me,” Reva admitted.
“Surely by now, thou hast realized that my men are ignorant of thy language, and that thou art ignorant of theirs. In thine own tongue only I can speak with thee. Therefore, thou canst do very little except that thou accompaniest me.”
“Yes, I noticed,” said Reva softly. So what do you have planned?
Gulchina ran her fingers idly through Reva’s hair, sending shivers of ice shooting down her spine.
“Thou art unlike any of my men, Reva. Thou hast no former allegiances, no friends to which thou canst return. Thy life is an empty matrix, a databank wiped clean, and thy soul yearnest to fill it.”
Reva tensed. How do you know so much about me? She tried desperately to think of something she could say to disprove her, but Gulchina’s words rang eerily true.
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.
“Behold this room. What seest thou?”
“I-I see a starship bridge,” Reva stammered. Hadn’t she answered this before?
“No, my child. Look deeper. It is no mere bridge, but a throne room for a kingdom of infinite space. And she who sittest here,” Gulchina said, pointing to her command chair, “shall be the queen of it.”
Stars of Earth, Reva thought. She wants to groom a successor.
“I-I don’t—” Reva began, but cut herself short as she realized the precariousness of her situation. In every practical way, she was absolutely of no use to Gulchina—the only reason she was alive at all was because she had somehow convinced Gulchina that she had something to offer. To refuse her now would almost certainly lead to her death.
Besides, why should she refuse the opportunity? Wasn’t this what she’d been looking for all along? A chance at a new life—not the sort of life she’d ever dreamed of, but at least something better than what she had only a few days ago. Before Gulchina, she’d had nothing. Now, a whole kingdom was before her.
“You want me to become your apprentice,” she said softly, as if the other men could understand her. Gulchina chuckled and ran her fingers down Reva’s back.
“In a manner of speaking, thou art correct. But it will not be an easy apprenticeship. Thou shalt have only one chance to prove thyself, and prove thyself thou must, for I shall not yield command to any lesser being. Understandest thou this?”
“Yes,” Reva said, swallowing.
“Thou hast passed through the crucible of ice,” Gulchina said softly. “Now, though shalt pass through the crucible of fire. If thou endureth it well, glory and power shall be added upon thee.”
And if not, Reva considered, hardly daring to finish the thought. Gulchina’s fingers dug into her back. But that wasn’t the only thing that sent shivers down her spine.
* * * * *
Isaac fought with all his strength to keep the lump in his throat from rising. Outside the porthole, he watched as the engines of the Medea fired in preparation for its final voyage.
That’s my father’s ship, he thought, his hands shaking uncontrollably. My father’s ship, and his father’s before that. He wanted more than anything else to scream, to fall on his knees, to plead with the pirates to stop. The Medea was more than a ship to him—it was his home, his life. In the endless void of space, it was all that he could call his own. And now …
The Medea’s sublight engines engaged, flaring up bright enough that he had to squint and cover his eyes. Slowly, the unmanned starship began its advance toward ultimate oblivion. Around the edge of the porthole, just outside of view, Ithaca’s white dwarf binary shone bright enough to drown out the entire starfield and cast shadows as harsh as the line between black and white. The Medea was barely recognizable in such light, but Isaac knew his starship better than he knew himself.
Now the ship was moving faster, shrinking quickly as it disappeared into the void. Only the twin pinpoints of light from its engines showed its position now. It looked vaguely like a comet, or perhaps a slow-moving meteor, flaring and then dying as it fell to its doom.
Isaac drew in a ragged breath and wiped at the tears that stung his eyes. He strained to catch one last glimpse of his ship, but it was gone.
Gulchina’s men had thoroughly looted the Medea, gutting it for parts and leaving only the barest systems that it needed to fly. They’d stashed the spare parts at a secret cache and had set the Medea’s autopilot on a course that would plunge it into one of the system stars. Isaac had begged them not to do it, but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Because he was an agent of the Resistance, the pirates couldn’t risk anyone finding any trace of the ship, and so the only course was to destroy it.
Now, watching it disappear as it fell into fiery oblivion, Isaac felt as if his heart had been wrenched out of his chest. He tried to cry, but the tears welled up deep inside of him, held back by a wall that now settled around his soul like a shroud. Without his starship, he felt as if something inside of him had died. If that’s what Gulchina had wanted to accomplish, she had succeeded.
“That’s enough,” said Jirga, Gulchina’s chief engineer. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s get a move on.”
Isaac complied without a word, his feet shuffling like so much dead weight. The post he’d been assigned to was a nasty and thankless one, performing maintenance work that no one else wanted to do. At least it put him out of the public eye, though, in a position where Gulchina and the other commanding officers would hardly ever see him. Free from their cold, cruel gaze, he could work out his next few steps without fear of discovery.
Aaron is still out there, he thought to himself as he opened the hatch to the narrow maintenance shaft. He has to be. And so long as there was a chance that Aaron was still alive, he would never give up, no matter what else the pirates took from him.
Someday, he would find a way off of this miserable ship. He would escape from Gulchina’s grasp and regain the freedom that he and the other outworlders were fighting to preserve. Then he would somehow make his way back to the New Pleiades, making sacrifices where he had to, taking odd jobs where he could. Eventually, he would find his brother, and they would work to rebuild all that they’d lost. Together, they would once again travel the stars.
But until that day, he would bide his time and keep his head down, waiting for the opportunity to present itself. And this time, he would not fail.
Author’s Note
Books can have a way of marking important transitions in our lives. For me, the transition from adolescence to adulthood was marked by Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech. That book helped me to understand the emotional changes that I was going through, it made me rethink the way I kept my journal, and it helped me to be more conscious of myself and my relationships with others. I became very emotionally attached to the characters in that book, and when it ended, I felt as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
Then I read Walk Two Moons, and I realized that the main character from that book was a side character in Absolutely Normal Chaos. In fact, in just about every one of Sharon Creech’s books, the main character is also a side character from another one of her books! When I realized that, some of the heartache from finishing Absolutely Normal Chaos was li
fted. Those words “the end” lost some of their awful finality, and I knew that even if my time with a particular character was over, they were still out there somewhere, and would occasionally come back.
I decided right then that if I ever became an author like Sharon Creech, I would do the same thing with my own books. Instead of starting over with a completely different set of characters, I would try to tell new stories from the point of view of a side character in one of my other stories. Every character has a story, after all, just like every person has a story. The thing that makes our stories timeless is the way in which they’re all tied together.
In a lot of ways, that’s how Sons of the Starfarers came to be. After I wrote the first four books in the Star Wanderers series, I decided to expand on the original story arc by writing books from some of the side characters’ points of view. When I got to Jakob’s story and how he had to send both of his sons away to seek their fortunes across the stars, I knew that I would have to come back and tell their stories.
There was a lot more to it than just that, though. Neither Isaac nor Aaron had anything to do with the events of Star Wanderers, so I couldn’t just write Parts IX through XII and throw them in. I had to branch out and write a completely new series, with new characters, new story arcs, and new conflicts. And that gave me an opportunity to close the Star Wanderers series, at least for the present time, and start over with something largely new.
Star Wanderers is a much closer and more intimate story, following a group of characters as they ultimately set out to settle a planet far on the Outworld frontier. Most of the drama is interpersonal, without too much conflict from outside of the immediate group of friends. Inasmuch as outside forces shape the story, they do so more as a force of nature than a concrete threat that the characters must face directly. No one in that series tries to fight back against the Empire.
With Sons of the Starfarers, I wanted to tell more of a classic action/adventure story, where the characters face off against the forces greater than themselves and save the world (or at least try to). I’d still keep the interpersonal relationships, of course—I doubt I could ever write a story where the plot drives the characters instead of the other way around—but I wanted to get back to the roots of what made me fall in love with science fiction in the first place.
My introduction to science fiction was Star Wars IV: A New Hope. I saw it when I was seven years old—the age when everyone should see it. After the movie was over, I spent the next hour running around the house pretending that I was flying an X-wing. In a lot of ways, I’ve never really stopped.
Later on, I discovered the more cerebral side of science fiction, with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and of course all the classics from Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, . I discovered the dark side with Dave Wolverton, Joe Haldeman, and George R.R. Martin; the fun side with and Louis McMaster Bujold; the meaningful side with Orson Scott Card, Walter M. Miller Jr, and Ursula K. Le Guin; the hard side with Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and the screw the science, we just want to have an adventure side from Jack Vance, Robert A. Heinlein, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read all these authors and more, but it always came back to flying that starship and saving the galaxy.
Another inspiration for Sons of the Starfarers was the movie Gettysburg. While I was teaching English overseas in 2012, I developed a deep interest in things that reminded me of my country and what it means to be an American. Perhaps the most defining historical moment in all of American culture was the Civil War, so I began to develop a deep interest in that era of history. On my kindle, I picked up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara and was absolutely enthralled by it. When I got back to the States, I found a copy of the movie based on the book (Gettysburg) and made it a personal tradition to watch it every fourth of July.
The movie depicts two brothers from Maine who serve together in the same regiment. Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain is the thoughtful, responsible one who commands the regiment to victory in one of the most decisive moments of the battle. In contrast, Tom Chamberlain is more of a happy-go-lucky guy who treats the war like a big adventure and doesn’t take a whole lot of responsibility at all. The dynamic between these two brothers, as depicted in the movie, was a large part of the inspiration for the relationship between Isaac and Aaron.
I never had any brothers growing up. I was the oldest of four children, and all my other siblings were sisters. In some ways, it’s easier for me to write female characters and characters who are brother-sister than it is to write two male characters who are brothers. But that’s the great thing about fiction: it allows you to explore relationships that you’ve never had a chance to experience in real life. Before I knew what was happening, Isaac and Aaron came of the page and started saying and doing things that I had never consciously planned for them to do.
The first two books came together very quickly. Comrades in Hope was especially fun to write, since it went back to all those classic science fiction tropes that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place. With Strangers in Flight, thought, I had a much harder time getting it to the point where I was comfortable with what I’d written.
I wanted to play the “no nudity taboo” trope, especially with things that I had planned to do later on in the series, but I wanted to do it in a way that was tasteful and realistic. For cultures that have a much different set of taboos governing public nudity, the unclothed human form is not nearly as sexualized as it is in our modern Western culture. But because we come at everything from the perspective of our own culture, it was difficult to present Reva in a way that didn’t overly sexualize her. I wanted the tension between her and Isaac to be more cultural than sexual, and that was a difficult line to walk. I think I pulled it off, but I had to struggle with a lot of writerly self-doubts before I got there.
As a writer, you have to decide whether to write the stuff that’s easy or to write the stuff that’s hard. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing the stuff that’s easy—Comrades in Hope was very easy for me to write, and it brought me right back to my roots which was awesome. But writing the stuff that’s challenging can really help to grow you as a writer and a storyteller. When given the choice, I almost always go with the stuff that’s challenging. Star Wanderers was challenging, especially with the polygamous love triangles. Bringing Stella Home was challenging because of the type of ending I was writing towards. Genesis Earth was challenging because of how the love story hit so close to home—same with Desert Stars, to some extent. In fact, when a story is challenging to write, it’s usually because it hits close to home in some way. But the closer it hits, the more honest it’s going to feel, and that’s the key to writing stories that are deeply moving.
I don’t know whether you’ve felt moved by the stories in this Sons of the Starfarers omnibus, but I do hope you’ve enjoyed them! If you have, I think you’re really going to like where this series is heading next. I’m not sure whether there will be nine books or twelve books, but there will be at least nine, perhaps more. I plan on bundling every three books, so the next omnibus will be books IV-VI, and the one after that will be books VII-IX. For updates on those or any of my other books, be sure to check out my blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs, or sign up for my email list. You can either sign up through this link here or through the sidebar on my blog. You can also follow me on Twitter—my handle is @onelowerlight—or friend me on Goodreads. And of course, if you want to send me an old-fashioned email, you can reach me at [email protected].
That just about does it. Thanks for reading! I say that a lot, but I mean it sincerely. Without readers, every book ever written would be just a bunch of scribbles on paper or jumbled up electrons on a memory drive. Stories don’t truly come alive until someone reads them. So once again, thank you for bringing these stories to life by reading them, and until next time, take care and be well!
Acknowledgments
No book that I write is ever a truly solitary venture,
and these books were no different. First, I owe a big thanks to all of my first readers: Ailsa Lillywhite, Amber Carlson, Ben Keeley, Logan Kearsley, and Stephen Dethloff. Your feedback is always invaluable—thank you. Also, thanks to my editor, Joshua Leavitt, for his good work, reasonable rates, and excellent turn-around time, and to my cover designer, Kalen O’Donnell, for his stunning work on the covers. Thanks so much for helping this series to become everything that I hoped it would!
The war for the Outworlds continues in Friends in Command!
THE FUTURE OF THE OUTWORLDS NOW LIES IN UNCERTAIN HANDS.
The war for the Outworlds is on. The Imperials may have lost the first round, but they're back—and this time, a ragtag flotilla isn't going to stop them.
When Aaron recieves a captain's commission in the new Outworld Confederacy, Mara is his natural choice for second in command. But Mara never expected to live past the first few battles. She only joined the resistance to avenge her father, and fears the monster she's starting to become. The only thing she has left to live for now is her friends.
The Imperials aren't the only enemy in this war, though. The friends must face a threat from within in
SONS OF THE STARFARERS
BOOK IV: FRIENDS IN COMMAND
A grand space opera adventure from the author of Star Wanderers.
