Chapter Two - Whipmaster Wu GrandMaster Karl Davidson was going to be Master of Ceremonies tonight. That wasn’t required by his position, but the reality is that powerful Masters and Mistresses often have delicate egos and would see great treachery in minor verbal faux pas. Thus, someone with the diplomatic skills of the GrandMaster needed to make all of the introductions, explanations, and, of course, the declaration of...

Chapter One - The Lady Emerges It was a very nice autumn evening and I was sitting on the back deck of my lake house sipping bourbon when the alarm on my phone sounded. That was immediately followed by a loud klaxon and an even louder speaker yelling out, “Intruder in the compound. Intruder in the compound.” I dove flat on the deck and grabbed the Glock that I keep in a waterproof holster attached under one of the benches...

“Hey, Mom!” Oskar called out as he entered the house. “Am I adopted?” Juliana had been dreading this day. She knew it would come, but she was hoping it would be after Oskar was a little older. He was a senior in high school, but still she hoped a few more years could pass before that question had to be answered. She had known for many years that the other children were teasing him for being... different. It wasn’t just th...

It was about two in the morning. I was having trouble sleeping because I kept having really weird dreams. Considering my very strange imagination, a dream has to be really out of the ordinary for me to consider it weird, but these dreams were definitely weird. Then Danny Boy appeared– not in my dream—but alongside my bed. He was standing well over two meters tall and glaring down at me. I could feel his eyes boring into m...

Every room in the house is lit. There are lights outside shining on the house. Even the trees are wound with lights so there are no shadows. My grandmother is totally nuts about Halloween. And no, I don’t mean that she gets everything decorated and hands out candy to all the mini-extortionists who jubilantly cry out, “Trick or Treat!” She leaves that to me, standing with a small table at the end of the walkway so the litt...

The Aurilian society had been peaceful for longer than anyone could remember. There was no war or crime on the planet of Aurilia. Some said it was because of economic prosperity. Some said it was because of very strict law enforcement. Some said it was because hunger had been eliminated. Some said it was because the mentally ill had been artificially removed from the Aurilian genome. But the true reason was the Chip Fair....

Arnold Davidson sat on the stage-front barstool at the Krazy Kat Klub just as he had done every night for the past twoweeks. There was a military bearing to the way he stood and walked. But his slight limp and some obvious, but muted, scars on the right side of his face made it clear that his fighting days were behind him. The girls called him “fiver on a budget,” meaning that he threw five dollar bills onto the stage or...

The UTCSS Neil deGrasse Tyson moved slowly through uncharted space. Technically it wasn’t uncharted, but no Terran ships had ever traveled into this relatively barren area of space. Through the years, the United Terran Confederation had sent many drone ships into this sector to explore and report back on gravitational fields, small asteroids, and any anomalies that might be present. But no crewed ships had ventured into t...

John has the best Halloween parties ever. I attended the first one of his parties ten years ago. I’m not on the guest list, never have been, but no one knows that. There are always a lot of party crashers at John’s Halloween parties. Part of the thrill of John’s parties is that everyone is totally anonymous. Many years ago such masked parties were quite the rage, but modern costumes and disguises are so much better. In fa...

The Karodang house has been on the side of the hill... forever. There are some old frontier pictures of great-great-great-grandma’s sod house from when they first settled their farm and the old stone house is in the background sticking out of “Granite Hill” as the locals call it. Some people from the state university came down and dug around a little both inside and outside of Karodang. There only conclusion was, “It’s ol...

Belinda Barnotti, known to her friends as BB, stood at the entrance to the Witch Hill Nunnery Museum silently debating with herself. She was almost a Doctor of Anthropology. All that was left for her to gain her PhD was to complete her thesis. Then she had to make a name for herself by turning that thesis into a book. That would make her a well-known anthropologist. Well-known anthropologists get teaching jobs in prestigi...

Sid is a good friend of mine from days long past. He has fallen on hard times. A lot of the men... and women who have been the places we have been and done the things which we have done have been overwhelmed by what has been burned into their memory once they try to “return to society.” Many, like Sid, try to drown the memories of what they saw... or did. When that didn’t work, he fell totally apart... booze, broads, drug...

They want to know when I first realized that I could change my world. That’s not exactly how they posed the question. They asked “When did you first realize that you were disconnected from reality?” That is a really stupid question, but not nearly as stupid as the questions they asked me in the mental ward. There everyone asked about how I handled the death of my parents and my three sisters in an auto accident when I was...

Lady Lucille’s Bar & Grill has been a fixture down on Second Street for many years. Supposedly it was once even closer to the river, but back in the big floods of ’93 it survived only because the owner and patrons got together to sandbag a six foot high flood wall all the way around it. Once the floods went down, the owner picked up the building and moved the bar three blocks– and about twenty feet in elevation– up to wha...

Chapter Five - Commander Sylvia Rogue walked up to the base airlock and reached up to trigger the microphone so he could speak the entry code. But before he could speak, Jada said cheerfully, “Good Morning, Rogue.” The lock on the inner door clicked and it swung inward. As he entered the kitchen area, Commander Blackstone looked up at him and said, “You look like hell. I was going to ask you more about your battle plans,...