ColGray
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2023
- Messages
- 368
This is the opening of a space opera sci-fi and I'm thinking of using it as part of an agent query package. From a use-case and introduction standpoint, I think it reads like the book will be mil-scifi and isn't, so I'm interested to hear assumptions along those lines.
Really appreciate thoughts and critiques!
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The Salmon Dance, Premiere-Class Merchant Vessel
Status: Bent
The pinnacle of human f*ck ups spread out before her, bruised light casting the promenade in ill colors.
Six Eigyr Bhatia dismissed her armor’s passive aggressive warning, ending the Saturday night red alert. She had no intention of opening her helmet to the mélange of rot and decay.
The vessel’s mall had probably been beautiful once, but the soft curves of garden wall and overhead walkway had been turned jagged and angular by the bend. Tiles that had been white obrounds when the ship bridged were now picket shaped, their swooping lines collapsed into points. The light made it look like they were walking on scales carved from old bone.
Engineered dogwoods peaked between levels, creamy flowers on full display. Eyes on the trunk, Eigyr stepped to the left, noting their perfect symmetry.
“Bend got the mall—tag it all for collapse,” she told the rookie, Mooks. Her One claimed the ex-corporate marine had potential. She had her doubts. Too much bravado. Too much marine dumbshit.
We aren’t the military, and this isn’t an op: we clear bents and we salvage.
The play of snk snk snk came through comms and her wuddy bracer vibrated.
A red dot turned white on her HUD.
“Bent, half in a chair. Old. Mostly dead,” Reyes said over comms.
“When Reyes says, half in a chair—” Mooks began, speaking on their private channel.
“He means the bent literally transverses into and through a chair and both the bent and chair are intact and functional. He’s telling us there’s an active Reimann,” she answered.
Mooks kept his silence, but his heart rate increased in the HUD.
He didn’t believe. Not yet. He was so sure Sixes just told stories. That they were just like his dumbshit buddies back home. No one believed, not until they saw something they couldn’t explain. Not until their brain fogged trying to understand how a body could unfold. How reality could be permeable.
But he would.
And then he’d either die, break or kill the bent.
No way but through. No one but us.
Boots softly clicking, they walked to, and then stopped at, the first door. The soft angles of the doorway remained gentle curves. She pressed her wrist to the door console. After a heartbeat, the console lit green, accepting the override code embedded in the proximity field of her wuddy bracer.
The door petaled open, revealing an expansive suite. The entry was a mix of personal space and a large console working area littered with small piles of plants. Her suit registered low-density paper mold spores. This might be the place. Piles of dust sat next to lush thyme sprigs. Some kind of herbalist? Perfumier?
The floor tiles were teardrop-shaped to match the tables, and in a swirling, unbroken pattern. Nothing amiss. No hard lines. No hard angles. She stepped inside and looked down the hall. Scans from her armor showed it sank back twenty meters and contained no obvious irregularities.
“Big unit,” she said. “Elmore’s right that this place had money.”
“Scarcity economics,” Mooks said, and she mentally rolled her eyes at him. Twenty-eight years in corporate polities, but he’d been White Flag for a month and was spouting post-scarcity economic magnanimity like a university freshman. She stepped down the hall and checked the rooms: bathroom, bedroom, another bedroom, storage room. All clean. All soft. Not the goal.
The back was an open kitchen and living space, a lifeless display dominating the rear wall. High-backed and plush, a turquoise L-shaped couch revealed two forms stretched out. A young couple in the peak of health, bowls, mugs and cloth napkins behind them on a small counter. They’d planned to eat after bridging.
Instead, they’d spent a quarter millennium asleep in a quiet pocket of space, heads centimeters apart.
Eigyr felt more than heard Mooks bring up his weapon, and she motioned one arm down. They were clean. She left them in the ignorant embrace of bridge sedation drugs.
An hour later they’d cleared twelve units, finding mainly desiccated corpses and the occasional healthy, unconscious body. Nothing off. Nothing wrong.
After a decade of clearing bents, she could feel the whisper. Hear the tingle. It was here: they just hadn’t found it yet.
Don’t look for trouble.
Things were going well. The map was a littered with green dots and Reyes and Vic were prepping to enter the data core. Even Mooks was doing okay. The kid’s numbers were elevated, but reasonable. He could hang.
She popped the next door and highlighted the immediate spike in wood and paper mold.
An older couple, still breathing, reclined in chairs in the massive foyer.
Who puts a foyer on a ship?
Carving tools and scattered supplies dominated the room’s center. Moving stone, wood, and tools, plus custom soundproofing, and ventilation, their condument must have cost a small fortune.
But the results were beautiful. Faces, each unique and carved from different varieties of wood and stone lined long tables. Long-bearded old men that whispered wisdom. Voluptuous women with aquiline noses and flowing locks that suggested shoulders. Each polished to a glossy sheen, catching and refracting light on the dips and swells of the surface.
It was like standing in front of an audience. It was engrossing.
She had a foot down the hall to the living area when she recognized the whisper. The tickle in the short hairs on her neck.
Mooks, lulled by the quick clears, brushed into her back, unable to erase all his momentum. She turned around, and he danced out of her way.
Eigyr’s eyes moved from one statue to the next. Man. Man. Woman. Child. Old man. Whisper.
Mooks dropped the mirror from his helmet, his face a silent question. He looked at her, looked at the table, then back at her. He couldn’t feel the whisper yet. He hadn’t yet made friends with breaks in reality.
She hoped he never would, but knew it was coming.
Tapping her ring finger on the stock of her weapon, a spotlight bloomed, lighting the stone face: a grinning, wizened visage rendered in peach-colored stone impregnated with cloud cover white swirls. He had dog-tail eyebrows and a bushy beard. The left eye twinkled cerulean blue, the light catching cut topaz.
The right eye socket consumed her light.
The whisper intensified. The brain knew when something was wrong.
She grabbed and lifted the heavy cloth draped over the table, revealing a spike of gnarled nothingness projecting through the table. It folded in upon itself, splitting along multiple vectors before tapering and thickening, swaying and sliding on the invisible currents of gravity.
Her mind itched. She had to see where it went. She had to look away. Look away. But it fell into the floor. It pierced the rear wall. It fell forever.
Really appreciate thoughts and critiques!
------------------
The Salmon Dance, Premiere-Class Merchant Vessel
Status: Bent
The pinnacle of human f*ck ups spread out before her, bruised light casting the promenade in ill colors.
Six Eigyr Bhatia dismissed her armor’s passive aggressive warning, ending the Saturday night red alert. She had no intention of opening her helmet to the mélange of rot and decay.
The vessel’s mall had probably been beautiful once, but the soft curves of garden wall and overhead walkway had been turned jagged and angular by the bend. Tiles that had been white obrounds when the ship bridged were now picket shaped, their swooping lines collapsed into points. The light made it look like they were walking on scales carved from old bone.
Engineered dogwoods peaked between levels, creamy flowers on full display. Eyes on the trunk, Eigyr stepped to the left, noting their perfect symmetry.
“Bend got the mall—tag it all for collapse,” she told the rookie, Mooks. Her One claimed the ex-corporate marine had potential. She had her doubts. Too much bravado. Too much marine dumbshit.
We aren’t the military, and this isn’t an op: we clear bents and we salvage.
The play of snk snk snk came through comms and her wuddy bracer vibrated.
A red dot turned white on her HUD.
“Bent, half in a chair. Old. Mostly dead,” Reyes said over comms.
“When Reyes says, half in a chair—” Mooks began, speaking on their private channel.
“He means the bent literally transverses into and through a chair and both the bent and chair are intact and functional. He’s telling us there’s an active Reimann,” she answered.
Mooks kept his silence, but his heart rate increased in the HUD.
He didn’t believe. Not yet. He was so sure Sixes just told stories. That they were just like his dumbshit buddies back home. No one believed, not until they saw something they couldn’t explain. Not until their brain fogged trying to understand how a body could unfold. How reality could be permeable.
But he would.
And then he’d either die, break or kill the bent.
No way but through. No one but us.
Boots softly clicking, they walked to, and then stopped at, the first door. The soft angles of the doorway remained gentle curves. She pressed her wrist to the door console. After a heartbeat, the console lit green, accepting the override code embedded in the proximity field of her wuddy bracer.
The door petaled open, revealing an expansive suite. The entry was a mix of personal space and a large console working area littered with small piles of plants. Her suit registered low-density paper mold spores. This might be the place. Piles of dust sat next to lush thyme sprigs. Some kind of herbalist? Perfumier?
The floor tiles were teardrop-shaped to match the tables, and in a swirling, unbroken pattern. Nothing amiss. No hard lines. No hard angles. She stepped inside and looked down the hall. Scans from her armor showed it sank back twenty meters and contained no obvious irregularities.
“Big unit,” she said. “Elmore’s right that this place had money.”
“Scarcity economics,” Mooks said, and she mentally rolled her eyes at him. Twenty-eight years in corporate polities, but he’d been White Flag for a month and was spouting post-scarcity economic magnanimity like a university freshman. She stepped down the hall and checked the rooms: bathroom, bedroom, another bedroom, storage room. All clean. All soft. Not the goal.
The back was an open kitchen and living space, a lifeless display dominating the rear wall. High-backed and plush, a turquoise L-shaped couch revealed two forms stretched out. A young couple in the peak of health, bowls, mugs and cloth napkins behind them on a small counter. They’d planned to eat after bridging.
Instead, they’d spent a quarter millennium asleep in a quiet pocket of space, heads centimeters apart.
Eigyr felt more than heard Mooks bring up his weapon, and she motioned one arm down. They were clean. She left them in the ignorant embrace of bridge sedation drugs.
Tag: Green
An hour later they’d cleared twelve units, finding mainly desiccated corpses and the occasional healthy, unconscious body. Nothing off. Nothing wrong.
After a decade of clearing bents, she could feel the whisper. Hear the tingle. It was here: they just hadn’t found it yet.
Don’t look for trouble.
Things were going well. The map was a littered with green dots and Reyes and Vic were prepping to enter the data core. Even Mooks was doing okay. The kid’s numbers were elevated, but reasonable. He could hang.
She popped the next door and highlighted the immediate spike in wood and paper mold.
An older couple, still breathing, reclined in chairs in the massive foyer.
Who puts a foyer on a ship?
Carving tools and scattered supplies dominated the room’s center. Moving stone, wood, and tools, plus custom soundproofing, and ventilation, their condument must have cost a small fortune.
But the results were beautiful. Faces, each unique and carved from different varieties of wood and stone lined long tables. Long-bearded old men that whispered wisdom. Voluptuous women with aquiline noses and flowing locks that suggested shoulders. Each polished to a glossy sheen, catching and refracting light on the dips and swells of the surface.
It was like standing in front of an audience. It was engrossing.
She had a foot down the hall to the living area when she recognized the whisper. The tickle in the short hairs on her neck.
Mooks, lulled by the quick clears, brushed into her back, unable to erase all his momentum. She turned around, and he danced out of her way.
Eigyr’s eyes moved from one statue to the next. Man. Man. Woman. Child. Old man. Whisper.
Mooks dropped the mirror from his helmet, his face a silent question. He looked at her, looked at the table, then back at her. He couldn’t feel the whisper yet. He hadn’t yet made friends with breaks in reality.
She hoped he never would, but knew it was coming.
Tapping her ring finger on the stock of her weapon, a spotlight bloomed, lighting the stone face: a grinning, wizened visage rendered in peach-colored stone impregnated with cloud cover white swirls. He had dog-tail eyebrows and a bushy beard. The left eye twinkled cerulean blue, the light catching cut topaz.
The right eye socket consumed her light.
The whisper intensified. The brain knew when something was wrong.
She grabbed and lifted the heavy cloth draped over the table, revealing a spike of gnarled nothingness projecting through the table. It folded in upon itself, splitting along multiple vectors before tapering and thickening, swaying and sliding on the invisible currents of gravity.
Her mind itched. She had to see where it went. She had to look away. Look away. But it fell into the floor. It pierced the rear wall. It fell forever.
I'm ok with some words not being explained right away. My issue is if I can't make headway with the story because too many words on the page are hard to decipher.
