Adventures into high strangeness.

She's almost here.

At the bottom of this story is this week’s free bookshelf, and next week there’s a big, singular update due from FreeFictionFriday which rolls four free bookshelves into one big email. Lots of free stuff for Christmas. I’m building a multimedia thing with my podcast, Halfplanet Press, my social media, and my stories here. It’s a lot of fun.

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Recently I’ve been preparing for the December 24th launch of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH: PART ONE, KILLING A UNIVERSE, which covers the first part of Stephanie’s life, where she discovers her synaesthesia has become a method through which she can see alternate realities.

I’ve also been hard at work on THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE, my novella about Galina Agafonov, the first (and last) human to (officially) contact alien life in my ever-expanding story universe. Her world fits into Stephanie’s in its own weird way, not that you need to know that to enjoy it. The links are there, under the surface, for dedicated readers to discover.

Here’s what I’ve got written this week.

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THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

Before they found her, Galina Agafonov was an astronaut. It was her decision to change the trajectory of the Pallas at the last minute, diverting the doomed starship toward a backup dash through the planets, a desperate bid to slingshot the thing around Jupiter and careen back to Earth.

It was the last course of action available.

It was the least likely outcome to their mission.

But the thought of it kept Galina awake at the academy. It kept her in the simulators well into the early hours of the morning. It kept her eyes open, fixated on the plastic ceiling tiles of her bedroom, as she imagined herself as the starship, spinning and whirling and adjusting her trajectory between cartoonishly disproportionate planets, moons, and asteroids.

It was the nightmare scenario, the utter devastation of every other possible worldline for the twelve crewmembers on the Pallas; that something should go so wrong during first contact that the humans picked to initiate that terrifying, tentative step, should be sent running back home, their ship half dead, their crew soon to follow.

And yet it happened.

Chapter One

Starwoman

Galina, EM, Clance, and Jeven were the last crewmembers left at the academy bar. Galina and Jeven were interlocked arm in arm, dancing to the instrumental end to The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby. Clance was watching them from the bar, perpetually adjusting his hair and pretending not to look over at EM, who was again scribbling something in her notepad.

Once the song ended, Galina and Jeven found their way to the bar.

“Karaoke ended forty-seven minutes ago,” Clance told them.

“We’ve been dancing very fast,” Galina said, her temporary Russian-American accent loosened by the alcohol. She put on an impression of Clance’s Texan drawl.

“So for us, honey, it’s still Ten of the Peee Ehm.”

Jeven bent over laughing, leaving Galina to lose her anchorage on him. She grabbed onto the bar, sidling up close to Clance and smiling.

“Time dilation,” she added.

“I got the joke,” Clance said. “Your last drink before the big day. You sure you want to make it excessive?”

“You forget my mother was Irish,” Galina said, pouting. “And anyway, Jeven here is becoming a grandfather. We have to celebrate.”

“Is that true?” Clance looked at Jeven over Galina’s shoulder. The shorter man found his way to the bar and ordered something quickly.

“It is indeed. He’ll be three years old when we get back.”

“Or four if the aliens are talkative,” Clance said.

“Too late for uplifting, you’ve killed the vibe,” Galina said. She sidled back to the dance floor, picking another song to sing on the laptop behind the DJ booth, before trying to Riverdance her way back to her fellow astronauts. She looked up at the ceiling, at the homemade solar system decorations that visiting high school students had donated some years before. Amid them all, just beyond the inaccurate orbit of Jupiter, a grey plastic tetrahedron, formed of four triangular sides, loomed.

“Tacky,” Clance said.

“Inspiring,” Galina replied. She turned her body around looking for something in the amateur sky above the dance floor, trying to piece together constellations from glow in the dark stars, glittery nebulae, and scrunched up asteroids.

“Is that his?” Clance pointed to a toy spaceship behind Mars, just out of Galina’s eyesight. She bent down slightly, shifting her perspective.

“Yes! There he is. My Victor.”

“He’s a good kid,” Clance said.

“I know. I told him, get good grades and you’ll be making paper planets for cocktail bar on the day I come back home. He laughed at this; said he wants to become a poet.”

“And will you let him?”

“He’s a person, not a dog. Poet, astronaut, doesn’t matter.”

“As long as he’s happy,” EM said. During the conversation Jeven had retrieved her from her outpost, bringing her back to the group.

“Precisely. As long as my Victor is happy, then I am happy.”

“I’ve been thinking about the manoeuvre,” Jeven said. “If the pyramid is hostile, we’re going to need to turn around faster than anyone’s planned for. I propose we stray from planned trajectory by five degrees, give ourselves room to drop out of orbit if things go wrong.”

“And if they go right?” Clance asked.

“If they go right, we’ll be fine.”

“No, we’ll be five degrees off.”

“It is worth the risk,” Galina chimed in. “Good idea EM. But we don’t need to change, everything is worked out. If the pyramid isn’t dead, if it is alien, if it is hostile, we will simply keep on flying until we go back around Jupiter, coming home quickly and with as much data as we can gather.”

“It’s dead,” Jeven added, his dark eyebrows forming a V shape. “But we all know it’s artificial. The chances of natural rock being beaten into that shape are… miniscule.”

“The heat signatures indicate otherwise,” EM added. She closed her notebook, and for a split second the rest of the group caught a glimpse of one of her drawings: An astronaut shaking hands with a triangular robot out in space, Jupiter in the background, with Saturn and her rings looming further still.

“I still think we should wait until it speaks to us,” Clance said.

“The Callisto probes talked to it, but it didn’t reply.” Galina took a sip of her drink.

“Maybe it doesn’t like us,” EM said.

“I’m not sure heat indicates life,” Galina added. “The thing could be an engine, or more likely, it’s a fragment from some collision.”

“Then why hasn’t it cooled down?” EM asked. The next song on the Karaoke machine began to autoplay, and Galina very quickly finished her drink.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll find out soon enough.” She took EM by the wrist and led her to the stage.

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So that’s one of the new opening chapters to THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE, my upcoming novella about first contact gone wrong.

It’s a lot of fun.

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And if you fancy reading more weird fiction, I got you covered.

This free bookshelf just unlocked, and is all about strange stories.

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Paid subscribers can read beyond this paywall, and see a rough cut of some more of TCWDT before it’s published. Warning: Spoilers ahead.