 |
 |
|
FOR EACH, THERE COULD BE ONLY ONE
THE
STAR QUEEN |
|
|
|
awards+achievements
-- Library Journal
-- Jennifer Keirans, All About Romance
-- Jill M. Smith, RT Bookclub
-- Lydia Funneman, Writers Unlimited
-- Katherine Schlem (aka Kitkat)
links The other authors in this anthology:
Chapter One The echo of a distant explosion rumbled through the vast underground network of caves. In the weapons lab where she'd worked all night, Taj Sai jerked her head up and listened. She'd never heard an outside -- "topside" -- blast from deep inside the caverns. Her fingers clamped around a handful of bomb fuses she'd been cutting. Her heart thumped against her ribs. She aimed her good ear in the direction of the nearest passageway, but hissing burners and bubbling beakers on her worktable and walls of solid rock drowned everything but the roar of her pulse. By now, fear and curiosity would have sent the others rushing to the Big Room at the front of the cave. Every nerve ending in her body screamed for her to drop what she was doing and follow. But she didn't feel felt like pasting charred strips of her quivering flesh pasted all over the walls of her lab. No thanks. Not tonight. It wasn't exactly her idea of redecorating. Taj glared at the fuses in her hand and threw them into their box. Cooling in an ice bath on her worktable was a solution of radic acid. She lifted the glass beaker and poured a thin stream of solution into a large spun-glass funnel filter. Delicate yellowish-white crystals collected at the bottom. A lethal harvest. Her skin prickled with sweat. Radites. In this state the compound was extremely unstable. If it contacted anything but glass -- boom ! That little idiosyncrasy had killed her predecessor. Taj knew -- she'd had to clean up the mess Pasha made. And Pasha. It had been four years since the old bombmaker had made an error and killed himself. But he could have killed someone else. That would have been worse. Sweat gelled on her skin, suddenly icy cold. Five men were topside tonight, honored raiders all.
But the new shaped charges hadn't yet been tested. The explosives crammed in those tiny cylindrical casings could breach the strongest armor, including -- she winced -- the skyport's fuel storage facility: hardened underground fuel reservoirs. The explosion she'd heard could have been those reservoirs blowing sky high. Had she combined ingredients in the wrong proportions, or had the booster charges malfunctioned due to an error she'd made? Great Mother! Had she made a blunder that killed someone? Her mind clouded with possibilities, scenarios. All the errors she'd ever made came back to haunt her. She was mostly deaf in her left ear, her eyelashes and brows had been singed off a half dozen times, and, once, the year before, she'd been flash-blind for a week. A consequence of honing her art. If one could call mass destruction an art. She, the legendary taskmaster for reducing accidents, had screwed up in that quest more than anyone knew. But the only one she'd ever injured was herself. Had that precarious track record just blown up in her face? Taj stared at the sweat glistening on the back of her hand, but saw bones poking out of scorched flesh, bloody fluid oozing from a socket where an eye used to be, violent convulsions driven by a fatally swelling brain, accompanied by the last, hoarse screams of agony before death silenced the suffering. Her mother had died silently, Taj had been told. But her battle with blood cancer, a disease curable in the long-ago days of tech and medical miracles, had gone on for the better part of a year, draining her. Taj had been two years old. Her father, he'd died valiantly, too, his fight to survive far shorter but no less heart-wrenching. She'd been fifteen when it happened, and his pointless death had changed her life forever. Joren had been a raider, "the best of the best" according to Romjha B'kah, the current raider commander but then only a cocky recruit. That brisk, gruff attempt to reassure her at the death vigil had bemused her. All that would have been required of him as a raider was to pay his silent respects to the last of Joren's kin. But as a boy, he'd idolized her father, more than most, and so he must have felt obligated to console her. The community had reached out to her, too, but the wealth of kind words only exacerbated her awareness of her loss. Grief, she hated it. More than that, she detested being afraid. Fear meant helplessness, and helplessness meant you had no say in your fate. But she'd found the antidote to that vulnerability -- not in the protective arms of a mate, as was expected, but in the manufacture of pyrotechnics. Frowning, she blew several long strands of hair off her face and reached for the beaker. Her hands were steady enough to resume filtering the radites. There was a rumble, and the entire room shook. Great Mother. Another explosion. This one sent stones and powder sprinkling down from high above plunking onto her head and worktable. She slapped her left hand over the beaker. A pebble bounced off the knuckle of her middle finger. Her stomach muscles clenched. Her pulse pounded in her throat. The beaker's cold rim bit into her palm. If she'd reacted a heartbeat later and the pebble fell into -- Don't think about it . She manufactured explosives; solids, liquids, powders, pastes, she mixed them all. She took on death daily, face-on, hand-to-hand; she wasn't supposed to care if she lived or died. Sooner or later, she'd figure out how not to.
Then she abandoned the lab to see what horrific news awaited her in the Big Room.
Like
it?
|
SUSANGRANT.COM | home | books | coming
soon | blog | meet susan | contest | write
to susan | site | copyright  |
They
came from the darkest places: secluded monasteries, the Carpathian
mountains, galaxies under siege. They were men with the blackest
pasts -- warriors, vampire monks, leaders of armies -- but whose
passions burned like dying stars. They had but one purpose: to
find
those women who fulfilled them, completed them, and made them rage
with a fire both holy and profane. They sought soul mates whose
touch consumed them, yet whose kisses refreshed like the coolest
rain. And each man knew that for him there was only one true
love
-- and in finding her, he would find salvation.
When my publisher invited me to be in an anthology
with two of my favorite authors, 
Finalist — 2003
PEARL award Best Novella 
"This
highly sensual, exceptionally well-done anthology by three of alternative
reality's top writers will appeal to devoted
fans and is well worth the notice of readers who have not experimented
with this subgenre." 
"This
novella tells the story of the love between Taj and Romjha, but
there's a broader theme. It's also about the way people respond to catastrophe.
[T]he connection between Taj and Romjha is intense, and the love
scenes are extremely hot. This is the most romantic story in the book. " 
Being
deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives
you courage. -- Lao-Tzu
Her hand shook. She set the beaker on its stand and wiped her knuckles across her brow, swallowing thickly. The raiders had brought along her new shaped charges, miniature pipe bombs a hundred times more powerful than their bigger brothers. The men loved the idea: a minimum amount of explosive for a maximum amount of damage. "More bang for the buck," went the ancient saying that wasn't as outdated as most thought. Currency might no longer be in use but explosives surely were. 