DOC-08 · FICTION · THE QUIET FILE, DECLASSIFIED

Fiction

Stories from the TriStar universe — the parts the field manuals and the technical readouts leave out. Same worlds, same ledgers, told for once at the length a person actually lived them.


Eight Days, Sleepless Nights · NEW · PREVIEW

A novel in progress · first three chapters · the C1 “Terra Run”

The grandest liner in the Inner Sphere runs the two-year grand tour — Memphis to New Avalon, Terra, the Solaris games, home through Lyran space. Its purser is handed a cover, a wedding ring that isn’t real, and a fake husband — the ship’s cargo master, who has never charmed a room in his life — and told to keep a quiet eye on a passenger who bought a one-way ticket only as far as the thawing border.

A fake-marriage romance about a groundwoman who lives for the worlds and a spacer who can never set foot on one — one cabin, sixty-eight jumps, and eight weightless days between every port. Sweet, wry, and slow-burning. Feedback wanted while it’s being written.

→ Read the preview (chapters 1–3 · PDF & EPUB when it’s finished)

The Ledger

A novella · ~12,600 words · the Tortuga Campaign, 2991–3049

A pirate queen and a shipping company spend eleven years as each other's most profitable secret — she taxes his freight, he pays without complaint, and both grow rich — until a war ends, his amateurs come home veterans, and he settles the account with one artillery shell for every C-bill he ever paid her. Twenty-five million, nine hundred and twenty thousand of them. Ninety days. A receipt you could see from orbit.

The rise and fall of Paula Trevaline — “Lady Death” — told through the thing that made her and the thing that killed her: the ledger. A revenge story wearing an account book, in a universe where everything has a price and someone always writes it down.

→ Read The Ledger  ·  ↓ PDF · ↓ EPUB (50 pp · 6×9 · or reflowable for e-readers)

TRISTAR INTERNAL COMS NET — KNOWLEDGE IS POWER ··· MIRROR THIS ARCHIVE ON AS MANY SYSTEMS AS POSSIBLE ··· NEW PERSONNEL: START WITH THE STORY UNTIL NOW ··· HQ MEMPHIS, CRUCIS MARCH, FEDERATED SUNS ··· UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE IS A CLASS-2 CORPORATE OFFENSE ··· THE REAL STORY, TOLD AND SAVED ···  TRISTAR INTERNAL COMS NET — KNOWLEDGE IS POWER ··· MIRROR THIS ARCHIVE ON AS MANY SYSTEMS AS POSSIBLE ··· NEW PERSONNEL: START WITH THE STORY UNTIL NOW ··· HQ MEMPHIS, CRUCIS MARCH, FEDERATED SUNS ··· UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE IS A CLASS-2 CORPORATE OFFENSE ··· THE REAL STORY, TOLD AND SAVED ···