JL Turner, $2.99, ISBN 978-0-9939222-5-1
Sci-fi Romance, 2018
The luxury starship Gryphon needs to make an emergency landing on the planet Haven.
Cressida had hoped that by booking passage on a luxury starship she might not run into the same issues she did traveling with the rest of the masses, but it appeared trouble was determined to follow her no matter what. It was a joke among her coworkers that if a ship or shuttle was going to break down, it would occur with Cressida Merchant aboard.
Okay.
She perked up at the mention of Haven. The tiny planet just past the edge of Zone space, and therefore civilization as she knew it was all but abandoned, and off-limits to civilians.
This could be interesting.
Oh god. Please no. Not that kind of heroine, please dear lord.
“Absolutely not.”
Cressida looked up at the mountain of a man who blocked the ship’s passenger entrance and pasted on her best wide-eyed innocent expression. “Sir, I don’t see the harm in letting me take a quick peek around off-ship while the crew conducts repairs. I just want to take a couple of holos. I promise I won’t touch anything.”
Someone just take up a baseball bat and brain me a few times, please.
Anyway, Cressida sneaks out and loses her balance, knocking herself unconscious. I stand up and cheer as carnivorous aliens emerge from their dens and devour her in a feeding frenzy. Five oogies!
Oh wait, no. Our hero, the cyborg Lukas, whose pee-po isn’t mechanical if you have to know, finds her instead. So once more, a man comes to save a woman from herself, and the balance is attained once again in the genre, praise Buddha and Baba Yaga.
She was running a fever, and he remembered that the launch area was surrounded by overgrown carnibo trees, a deciduous species replete with toxic sap native to Haven. The Zone militia’s chemical weapons division once used that sap to create mild nerve agents.
And she was lying in a double-thorned rose bush, so she was probably scratched all to hell in addition to being poisoned.
Damn it, just die already. Die, die, die, damn it.
The voice was unfamiliar, male, and deep. Fear snaked its way down Cressida’s spine.
Haven was supposed to be an uninhabited planet. The only thing that could possibly be worse than being marooned on an uninhabited planet was being marooned with a strange man.
DIE, DIE, DIE. Maybe if I repeated that often enough, it will become a reality.
“I’m Cressida. I guess we’re going to be roommates, so I thought you should know.” She tried to smile. “I’d shake your hand, but …” She wiggled her sticky fingers. “You know.”
Great, she’s not only dumb as a flattened roadkill, she also thinks it’s cute to do that Buffy-speak thing.
Cressida used the time alone to explore the tower a little, not that there was much to see. It had obviously been a control area before the planet was abandoned; the command consoles and thinscreens were still installed all over the small area, although they were dark. She found a thinscreen devoid of dust with some cables dangling from it and gently tapped it.
It lit up, and the words PLEASE CONNECT MANUALLY flashed across it. When Cressida tapped it again, nothing else happened.
I can see she has learned nothing about not touching things that do not belong to her.
She wasn’t there when he returned, and a mild thread of worry unwound through him as he searched it. The storage lockers holding old uniforms had been opened, and an energy bar taken from the rations on the first floor missing. He wouldn’t begrudge her that. Military-issue, non-perishable energy bars were nearly inedible, even to a cyborg who wasn’t supposed to care about taste. The food that was left behind was the primary reason he’d set up the hydroponics in the first place.
Oh no, not again, please. Even left on her own, she can start an apocalypse.
Cressida walked to a collapsed thermowire fence, its charge long since shut off, and stopped. Beyond the fence was an even more depressing landscape than the abandoned settlement: more carnibo sap trees, more double-thorned rose bushes and other flora she couldn’t identify, and dark, tarry pools. A broken sign rested in the thermowire that screamed DANGER BEYOND THE FENCE in several languages. She didn’t know what all of those dangers were, and she didn’t want to find out. What was the likelihood that Lukas could come to her rescue twice in one day?
Okay, she dies. I don’t care what anyone says. She dies there and then. She dies.
DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
