For about a year, I've been putting together ideas and draft chapters for the first book in a series of science fiction novels. This week's blog entry is the prologue. What do you think? Would you want to read more?
Prologue: The Arrival
Nerio
Space Station, Low Earth Orbit
It
didn't look like much, she had to admit. If da Vinci had cobbled together a
spacecraft out of scraps from a twentieth-century junkyard, it might look a bit
like the Javelin. But still, it was something
entirely different from the repeated string of faceless freighters she
typically wrangled in, and thus a welcome change. The steel-framed fuselage was
littered with solar panels, each slowly craning for sunlight as the ship arced
towards her at a ponderous pace. The solar panels reminded her of time-lapse
videos of flowers blooming, gracefully yearning for light.
“Hey
Valerie, can you see it yet?” asked her co-pilot Erica Taskin. It was silly
calling them pilots Valerie thought, her mind wandering off task. From her
frame of reference they never actually flew anywhere. People on the ground
might have a different perspective of course, but -
“HEY!
VALERIE!” Erica tried a little louder this time, the increase in volume nearly
maxing out Valerie's earpiece.
“Yeah,
I see it. It's too junky-looking to be a freighter, it must be the Javelin.” And her tabloid-happy captain. There was a little extra edge to her
voice when Valerie spoke the name of the incoming ship. This was not lost on
Erica.
“So
I can't tell, do you hate him or have a thing for him? It has to be one or the other.”
“Shhhhh!
C'mon Erica we've got work to do. You see him out your porthole yet?”
“Him?
You know it's bad luck to refer to a ship with a masculine pronoun. But yes, I
see her arriving right now.”
