ANNIHILATION ARIA excerpt (Patreon)

Hello, wonderful patrons! Today I have a treat for you - the first of several excerpts we'll be sharing from ANNIHILATION ARIA. Parvus and I are hoping to place some with bigger venues, but I wanted y'all to have the first look at the book. As a reminder, ANNIHILATION ARIA comes out July 21st and you can find all the buy links here:

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Chapter Two
Lahra

Lahra Kevain sang “Sahvo’s Embrace” to her armor in the sun-soaked cargo hold. The embrace was an aria of resilience and rebirth from the epic of Zhore, sung originally by a love-struck guardian to the princess who was her charge.

The song awakened the suit, allowing her armor to repair itself using the sun’s energy. The coral-steel resonated with her voice, stitching itself back together, scalloped ridges and joints sealing and smoothing over. One by one, traces of her and Max’s last misadventure faded, and the suit returned to its optimal form.

Lahra stood in underclothes, the cargo hold baking as mostly-filtered sunlight streamed through the starboard portal. The portal nearly filled an entire side of the cargo bay, eight meters high and ten meters long. The radiation of the nearby star was reduced such that it would not harm her but would still power the suit’s regenerative capacity, guided by her song. And it might help restore the lustrous azure tone her skin had gained that summer working sentry on the grain farms of Ikerr.

Her voice was low, solid, like packed earth. Her mother’s voice had been richer, like fresh-tilled soil. Halra Kevain had sung to Lahra all her life, taught her all the songs needed to operate the suit and to fight as a royal guardian. All of the greatest power of the Genae was conveyed through song, from the marches of the royal guards to the songs of restoration, as well as the snippets Lahra had picked up from other Genae. 

Lahra’s repertoire was a mere shadow of the full power of the soldier caste, so much of their legacy lost.

Lahra lifted the heel of one of the suit’s legs and watched the puncture hole close over. More warmth slid into her tone as she continued, diving into the chorus. “Sahvo’s Embrace” was meant to be sung in call-and-response, sergeant to her squad. She’d taught it to Max, but with the way he fought (mostly through stealth and hiding behind solid objects), it failed to serve its original purpose. The Embrace sang strength into a squad’s suits and their limbs, recalling the rebirth brought with the sun’s return in the spring.

Max stood on the other side of the cargo hold, bent over his laboratory and research desk, where he had hooked their just-liberated device into his terminal. Up a ladder from the hold were the gunner’s turret, the living quarters, and the hatch to the engine room. Above that, at the top and front of the ship, was the cockpit—Wheel’s domain. 

Max all but lived at his desk. In the seven years Lahra had known him, he’d always been driven, focused, but also kind, charming. He remembered names as easily as textual citations. But not songs. Singing was hard for him, his voice thin. He had an ear for language but not music. A cosmic joke, one of many.

The suit was whole, her song complete. She left it in the sun to absorb energy, her greatsword locked in place on the suit’s back.

“How goes the decryption?” Lahra took her customary place to Max’s left, looking on as he worked. 

“Mostly there. Anything I can’t crack, Uwen can take care of. Anyway, he likes it when I go to him for help. Think he enjoys feeling useful.”

“Or that you still have more to learn.”

Max nodded, the wall lamps illuminating his brown skin .“Which is true. This section here still makes absolutely no sense to me. And without that, I can’t tell if the chart is telling us to go into the center of the Forbidden Sectors or if it wants us to go beyond warp space.”

“Surely it is the former.” 

Warp space delineated the known galaxies. Beyond those bounds, ships crawled along at a fraction of the speed of warp travel. The Forbidden Sectors were so-dubbed because they held the core of the Old Atlan Empire, destroyed by the Vsenk in their usurpation. But since those broken or abandoned planets contained forgotten Old Atlan technology, they were an ideal place to hunt for artifacts.

“I sure hope so. Not sure we could convince Wheel to take a three-month trip on burners only.”

“You want me to take the ship where now?” Wheel called down the echoing halls of their ship. The Kettle was small enough that it was hard to ever be truly out of earshot.

“Nowhere yet!” Max shouted back.

Lahra laid a kiss on his temple, her fingers trailing along his shoulder and neck as a reminder and a promise. “Let me know if you need any help.” She relished in his happy shudder and hauled herself up the ladder by door to the engine room. She walked by her shared quarters with Max, Wheel’s quarters, the bathroom, the gunnery station, the ship’s meager galley, and then up another short ladder to the cockpit.

Cruji snored in one corner, curled up in his straw-laden cage. The molja was a mass of tentacles and feathers and had no practical use aside from boosting morale.

Wheel was elbow-deep in the Kettle’s control console. The Atlan’s skin was the color of faded moonstone, arms and much of her back replaced by cybernetic implants. When she plugged in all the way, the console grew to meet her, screen connecting to a cybernetic eye, panels and switches sprouting cables to interface directly with Wheel via ports from head to hip. 

The Atlan were the only species fully adapted to cybernetic enhancements, allowing them to control spaceships through a neural link. Lahra or Max could pilot the Kettle, but only Wheel could truly inhabit it. Atlan’s cybernetics spanned a wide range of technologies, none more fiercely guarded than those allowing direct connection with ships’ computers and warp drives.

Lahra and Max had been working with Wheel (and as a result, living on the Kettle) for several years. Wheel was taciturn, mostly liked being left to herself and the ship’s business, but she had unparalleled contacts—including fences that would take nearly any Old Atlan artifact she and Max could find.

The Atlan had once ruled warp space, but when the Vsenk took over, the Atlan homeworld was destroyed and the survivors scattered to the winds. They survived by adapting and through their monopoly on the capacity to interface with warp drives. What took a day’s travel via warp space would take months otherwise. 

Now the Atlan were pilots, mechanics, engineers. They’d made themselves essential but rarely held power beyond their lock on transportation. The Vsenk resented the Atlan’s adaptation and continued to scapegoat them at every turn.

“How’s the imperial traffic?” Lahra looked out the viewscreen into the black. Sensors would pick anything up before her eyes could, but she couldn’t break the habit. And any system could fail. “Always trust yourself more than your gear,” her mother had sung to her time and time again. That line was one of dozens from a song she’d composed to a traditional tune, an amalgamation of half-remembered lessons from her own youth.

Wheel’s arm twisted, and a map with dozens of red dots popped up on the screen next to Lahra, showing their weaving path through the gaps left between the imperial sensors. “No patrols within range. Just the buoys they’ve littered around the system like Drell droppings.” 

To hear them tell the tale, the Vsenk Imperium had ruled for ten thousand years. They created the universe and loved their creation so much that they chose to live among their children as benevolent god-emperors. 

Lies, all of it. The Vsenk had overthrown the Old Atlan and made warp space their own a thousand years ago. Since then, they’d tried to erase every bit of history they could. Controlling schools, outlawing texts, enforcing an imperial monopoly on comm relays, the Vsenk kept a tight grip. But the Vsenk had destroyed a half-dozen inhabited worlds along the way, eliminating most of the Atlan’s greatest technology.

The Empire could keep the real histories in the margins, but people remembered the truth of the Vsenk’s rise and the Atlan’s fall. Most were just smart enough not to say so where the Vsenk could hear them.

The last people to challenge the Vsenk had been the Genae. Lahra’s people. The Genae gave the Vsenk their greatest challenge, but in the end, even the battle songs of her sisters were powerless against the Vsenk’s super-weapon, the Devastation. The Vsenk cracked the entire planet of Genos into several pieces, ending the war in one stroke. The surviving Genae, including Lahra’s great-great-grandmother, scattered on the solar winds, swearing vengeance and pledging themselves to restoring the crown.

The Vsenk were many things—cruel, arrogant, aggressive; but above all else, they were absolutists. They prized decisive victories.

With more than two dozen systems to patrol, however, even the Vsenk couldn’t be everywhere at all times. By best estimates, there were only a few thousand Vsenk, even after centuries of aggressive breeding programs to counteract their low fertility. They leaned heavily on a vassal-driven military, which meant that Lahra and Max could operate at the edges, keep off the radar, and be about their missions without running afoul of Imperial forces for more than a bribe here or there coming or going from docking stations. 

Most of the time.

“How long until we’re back at the Wreck?” Lahra asked.

“Without attracting Imperial attention? Better part of two days.”

Max walked into the cockpit on the comms. “That should be plenty of time to figure this thing out and be ready to chat with Uwen.”

“Two days it is,” Lahra said. “I’m going to check our supplies, see how much of our payment we’ll need to end up pouring back into the ship.”

Wheel cocked her head to the side the way she did when she was analyzing data. “The Kettle’s plenty hungry, but she can last a while if need be. As long as you two are fine eating algae paste.”

Max made a sound of mock delight. “Just like momma used to make.”

“Why not?” Lahra asked. “It’s incredibly efficient food.” Back home, efficient food wasn’t available. You took what you could get.

Max had come from Earth, an industrialized, non-spacefaring culture. But at least they too had music, so they were odd, not barbaric.

Lahra slipped into a song of memory as she began her rounds, tallying spare parts, rations, and more. The song helped her hold the numbers and details in her mind, a musical memory palace. 

They’d survived another adventure, and now the song of battle and exploration gave way to the daily work songs of maintenance and travel. 

Until the next explosion. Which would inevitably come sooner than they expected.

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Find out more about ANNIHILATION ARIA at the publisher's website.