Work-in-progress - Genrenauts 2x01 (Patreon)

As patrons at the $3 level and above, you get access to works-in-progress, from new Genrenauts stories to other drafts that aren't currently active.

Today, I bring you a sneak peak at the second season of Genrenauts. Obviously, there are spoilers for the end of the first season. This is still an early draft, so it may change substantially and it won't be as clean as the final version you'll get later as backers at this level.

--

Genrenauts 2x01 -- The Wasteland War
Prologue -- Life on the Road

Angstrom King was getting too comfortable living the life of a Road Warrior. He threw his car into a drifting turn, kicking up dust as he concealed his tracks. Head anywhere without covering your trail and you’d have vultures on your ass before you could say ambush.

Over the past three months, he'd spent six days in the field for every one on Earth Prime. Back long enough to top off on food and water and re-set the story world’s hold on him. He’d change safehouses each time and then jump back into the wasteland on the way to one or another story world. He kept his head on a swivel here more than anywhere, since by the world's very nature, there could be danger around every turn, watchers on every horizon.

Operating within the aegis of a Max didn't made him immune to random trouble. Probably invited more of it, in fact. But as long as he was in the middle of trouble, he knew where he stood.

Between chases and rescue missions in the wasteland, King had traveled across the multiverse looking for traces of Raven's team of rogue Genrenauts. They’d spent nearly six months moving from breach to breach before Leah’s fresh eyes and intuition tied the pieces together and showed how the woman that called herself Raven and her team had been breaking stories and interfering with the Genrenauts’ efforts. 

The impossibility of another group of dimensional travelers, ones that knew about the Genrenauts and their mission had led him across a dozen worlds.

He'd talked to fierce bookseller's daughters between grand balls populated by an impossible number of dukes, traded information with Texas Rangers on the train between Old West towns, sought out temporal retrospective devices from alien tech dealers, and more. But all he had to show for it was a handful of clues and a lot of wear and tear on his emergency crossing device. It wasn’t meant for sustained, repeated use like this. And eventually, it would fail and could leave him stranded somewhere with no way of reaching Shirin or the others. Every trip he took might be his last, shipwrecked in some story world to get swallowed up by the narrative and forget himself.

King looped around into the shade of a cavern containing one of the team’s many caches on this world. He threw the car into neutral and stepped out, shotgun in one hand. It was dangerous to return to the same cache so frequently, but it was necessary. Shirin kept him well-equipped, thankfully, siphoning off resources to maintain his crossing device and restocking the caches he raided in the various story worlds. They exchanged messages in the caches, Shirin keeping King updated on the team and how Mendoza was leading (like a man that only has a hammer and therefore sees nothing but nails). 

By all rights, Shirin should be leading the team – she had the experience, the grit, and knew the others better than anyone. Shirin was a one-woman logistics division on top of being a canny operative in her own right. But she’d also served with King for more than a decade, and if the High Council didn’t trust him, that distrust would naturally extend to his team. Hence the man with the hammer.

King moved the rocks with practiced efficiency he'd developed living on the run, setting them aside to make re-building the pile in exactly the way it had been as quick and easy as possible. He spun the lock to the code Shirin had left in her previous message and cracked open the cache. He grabbed the water bottles, rations, ammo, and Shirin's update. He skimmed the message to make sure there weren't any emergency notices, then tucked his own message deep into the cache, sealed up the case, and replaced the rocks.

He could re-read the message when he was back in an outpost. The butte was the closest from here, and they'd just finished a story arc, inter-community conflict that had ended in a political marriage. It should be stable enough for a while, even as the story breaches continued to come faster and harder the way they'd done over the past year. From missing protagonists to convention-breaking bad luck, every story that went off-track added to the chaos and entropy rippling across the multiverse.

Which in turn pushed the Genrenauts to work harder, faster, without breaks, without backup. It wasn’t sustainable.

Built into the expanded cave system within a hundred-foot-tall rock formation beside a not-quite-mountain range, the butte was an ideal location. The current occupants had taken it from raiders a few years ago. Not a story he participated in, but the residents repeated it often. The tale of brave and cunning, Alexandria (aka "Lex"), their heroic war leader For three long days and nights she'd haunted the shadows of the cave system and killed the raiders one by one. After she'd taken over, she'd done something even more impressive.

Done with the cache, he pulled away, covered his tracks, and set out. An hour of driving later, he saw the wonder with his own eyes. It never stopped amazing him. Lex’s people here had built elaborate hanging gardens, lashing each layer to the tunnels in the rock face to allow for ease of tending.

There was enough food growing on those terraces to feed a hundred people. And the community was only forty strong. They traded food for protection and mechanical supplies, the former from their now-blood-tied-neighbors and the latter from roving merchants that came and went.

Roving merchants like him. The guards dropped their twenty-foot-wide banner reading STOP NOW.

King complied. They knew him, knew the vehicle, but they still checked every single time.
It was the reason they were still around. 

King got out of the car slowly, shotgun left in its holster. The smaller guard patted him down, then waved him over to the winch.

"Welcome back. What'd ya bring?"

King winked. "Can't give away my secrets until there's a crowd to sell to. Unless you want to make it worth my while to give an exclusive?"

"Don't have the scratch for that, friend. Plus Lex would roast me."

Maybe the second smartest thing Lex had done was widen one of the lower tunnels to be large enough to drive small cars through. It meant that they didn't have to post separate guards to defend their patrol vehicles, though the tunnel wasn't large enough for the big convoy trucks. King drove the car over to a tunnel covered by a metal plate. The guard yanked on a chain attached to the bottom of the plate, which ran up to the top of the butte, then pounded twice on the plate itself.

The plate lifted, revealing a soot-stained tunnel leading down into the core of the butte. A trio of burly folks emerged from the shadows carrying a ramp, which King used to bring his car down into the community's garage.

The communities of this story region varied intensely, given the many ways that people tried to eke out existences in the post-apocalypse. Maybe half of the communities had specific living areas, and most of those had group housing, with beds or cots or hammocks in clusters.

As King opened the trunk to pull out the trade goods, a pair of runner burst into the room. 

"She's back," The runner said, stopping to spread the news.

"Looks bad,” someone said.

"Get the stitch!” from another.

“I got it, just help bring her in,” said the other runner.

Minutes later, the ramp-keepers carried a small bloodied woman inside, setting her on top of a car. It was Vic, a local messenger and courier. Lex and an elderly woman emerged from the rickety human-powered elevator that ran through the butte. Lex’s companion wore glasses and carried a dusty leather doctor's kit emerged from the rickety human-powered elevator that ran through the butte.

Lex was a mountain of a woman, broad-shoulders, a wide face, and fists the size of most people's heads. She stood six-three but, thanks to force of presence, she always felt ten feet tall.

"What happened?" Lex asked, taking Vic's hand.

"They shot me. I stopped, waved my flag. But they shot me."

"Who?" King asked.

"The battleshippers," she said. "Guess that alliance didn't work out."

Lex flinched as if someone had just socked her in the jaw with a sledgehammer.

This smelled like a breach. King helped out as the stitch attended to Vic's wounds. Never hurt to have a pair of helping hands – medical standards in this story world were terrible at best. These people knew him as a trader, but not just one – he’d lent a hand here, advised Lex there. He had real standing in this community and wasn’t interested in losing them. He heard more about the shooting in bits and pieces, enough to make him antsy. Goods unloaded and official business done, he jumped back in his car to head out and see what was going on.

And tell Shirin. Because if there was a breach here, pretty soon King wouldn't be the only Genrenaut kicking around the wasteland.