Welcome to Blowback, the fifth novel in my Finder space opera detective series! I’m posting the first three chapters as a preview. The book won’t be officially released until the fall, but the Kickstarter campaign for an early copy of the ebook and trade paperback launches tomorrow!
Hope you enjoy!
Chapter 1
The lights died in Finder Vince Grable’s small office right in the middle of a conversation he was having with an increasingly hysterical middle-aged woman about a missing family heirloom. Conversations like this weren’t unusual. Vince’s job was to find missing people and things and he was pretty good at it.
The power cutting out on Zyga Space Station, on the other hand? That was unusual.
Seated in his comfortable desk chair behind his jade green desk, Vince froze, wide-eyed, in the sudden blackness. His personal office airscrubber died mid-cycle, leaving an awful silence in its wake.
His client, Mrs. Kawana, cut herself off mid-sentence.
At her desk two meters away, Vince’s dark-haired assistant Bella Escovedo also froze, but unlike Vince, Bella could see in the dark. Being a human mind stuck in an android body had its upsides.
For one heart-stopping moment, Vince felt gravity lose its hold on him. He was weightless; his slightly stocky, average-height body no longer confined to his chair. He swallowed. The sound seemed too loud in his suddenly tomb-like office.
The dark silence was complete, pressing in around him like some giant living being attempting to swallow him whole. The only difference was that the crushing vacuum of open space hadn’t killed him.
Vince took a breath that still smelled faintly of Bella’s floral perfume and strained his ears, trying to determine if even the ever-present thrum of the space station’s engines had ceased. In the more than ten years he’d lived aboard Zyga Space Station, he had never ever experienced a power disruption.
Just then, the Station’s emergency backup system kicked in and gravity reasserted its hold. Vince’s rear end thumped back into his chair. The furniture in his office made muffled thuds as everything fell a centimeter or two to the floor. Something ceramic made an awful cracking sound and the scene of fresh aloe vera filled the office.
At the same time, tiny red emergency lights flared to life along the edges of the beige carpet covering the deck. They cast an eerie red glow over everything, lending a perspective to his office Vince could honestly say he’d never seen before. At the same time, the two massive holoscreens he’d hung on opposite walls to keep his small office from seeming claustrophobic switched back on, displaying an emergency message Vince had never seen before.
He glanced to his right at the large glass window that separated his office from the enclosed boulevard outside. Lines of red lights appeared along either side of the boulevard. Dark shadows made the lights blip in and out as the pedestrians who had been traveling along the boulevard scattered in a panic. It looked like the power had gone out in most—if not all—of Level 7.
Still clutching his comlink to his ear, the Finder then glanced over at Bella. His assistant stared back at him, her almond-shaped eyes wide with shock. Half of her ivory, heart-shaped face was splashed red, and the other half lay in shadow. It was an odd effect; it looked like half of her black hair and blunt-cut bangs had disappeared.
In her dark eyes, however, he saw reflected the same question running through his mind: what in the galaxy had happened?
Vince planted his feet flat on the deck and prepared to launch himself to his feet, but at that moment his client got over her shock and started shrieking hysterically into his ear. Wincing, Vince yanked his comlink away from his ear and held it out in front of him. The red glow from the emergency lights looked strange against the darkness of his skin. Dimly, he wondered if the red light made his black goatee and curly, close-shorn black hair look as strange as Bella’s.
He didn’t have time to think about that now, though. He finally stood up, unconsciously holding onto the edge of his desk as though he expected the grav generator to go on the fritz again.
Although, really, he thought in bemusement, the desk isn’t likely to help me much. It’s not like it’s bolted to the deck.
His shock passed, and Vince started processing everything. Mrs. Kawana was still shrieking hysterically. She lived on Level 8 in Zone 2, so this power outage, whatever it was, was affecting at least two of Zyga Space Station’s five spoke-like Zones.
That…was not good. Particularly since Zone 2 housed the Station’s agricultural department.
“Mrs. Kawana, please.” Vince kept his deep voice as calming as he could. “Breathe. Just breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
It took a moment before the woman could speak coherently—and not in an ear-shattering pitch. “What is going on? Why is the power out?”
“Are the emergency lights on where you are?”
Instead of reassuring his client, this only set her off again. “Of course the emergency lights are on! They’re supposed to be on when something like this happens! But why is this happening? What is going on?” She barely seemed to be even drawing breath.
A soft snicker drew Vince’s attention sideways, just in time to see Bella clap a hand over her mouth. Her long fingernails glinted reddish-silver in the emergency lights. She raised expressive eyebrows at Vince as though to say, Is she for real?
Vince rolled his eyes. Mrs. Kawana’s stream of borderline hysterical comments and questions continued. He opened his mouth, preparing to find a good spot to cut in and take control of the conversation again, but at that moment the glow panels in the overhead flickered back to life.
Blinking in the sudden wash of warm golden light, Vince focused his attention on the deck beneath his feet. Even through the beige carpet, he thought he felt the faint vibration that signaled the Station’s engines were functioning properly.
It could have been his imagination. He wasn’t completely sure you could even feel that vibration out in the Zones, away from the Core, the center of the space station.
Mrs. Kawana drew in a sharp, sudden breath—and Vince knew the power was back on in Zone 2 as well. Crisis averted.
At least temporarily.
“The power—it’s back!” she cried exuberantly. “I—”
“Mrs. Kawana,” Vince cut across her. “I’m glad you’re all right. Thank you for all the information you’ve given me. I will keep you posted on my investigation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other clients to attend to.”
The Finder barely gave her time to stutter some sort of acquiescence before he ended the transmission. He then dropped his comlink on the jade green surface of his desk and turned to his assistant.
Bella sat at her desk, one hand still flattened on its matching green surface as though she thought she could somehow hold it down by sheer force. She looked as unnerved as Vince felt.
If she’d still been human, he was sure she’d be breathing heavily, one hand pressed to her chest. But Bella wasn’t strictly human anymore, and so little things like unconscious physiological responses no longer applied to her.
“What was that?” she asked, her voice higher-pitched than usual.
Vince suppressed a wince. Okay, make that most unconscious physiological responses. He’d once seen Bella literally shatter glass with her voice; they didn’t need a repeat.
Bella shook her head, the movement making her long, shiny black hair glint under the light from the glowpanel. “I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never seen the Station lose power before.”
“Never?” Vince stared at her, his mind working furiously. He’d only been here a little over a decade. “Ever?”
“No.” Bella shook her head again, a little too enthusiastically. For somebody who’d been transported into an android shell against her will, she had handled the transition fairly well, but there were still moments when her lack of full control showed. “Not in my lifetime.”
Well, that was interesting. Vince blew out a considering breath, his client and her missing heirloom temporarily forgotten. “Then you know the media will be all over this.”
He kept abreast of Zyga Station News, but he didn’t often watch the news feed. The official narrative was helpful, but there were many times he needed information from people in parts of Zyga Space Station the media would never cover.
Rubbing his goatee, which was bristling, Vince wondered what category this power outage would fall under. He turned to one of the holoscreens mounted on the wall to his left.
Only one way to find out.