Sneak Peek: Poor Man's Fight 6! (Patreon)

Hi all!

This is a longer sneak-peek than I'm usually inclined to release, so no setting this as a precedent here! However I know I've been a little slim on a couple rounds of sneak-peeks so I figured maybe this would make up for it. Plus it helps with context.

The draft is currently at 12.5k words and I'm writing a little slow lately, but I hope to pick up the pace as I get into it. No projections on when it'll be ready for release. I promise I'm in a bigger hurry than you are!

PMF 6 kicks off with the long-anticipated wedding of Madelyn Carter, Tanner's unrequited high school crush. The wedding is outside Archangel, but the event gives Tanner his first encounter with people from his home planet of Michael since the war... namely Madelyn's parents, Sandra and Terry.

“We never knew what to believe about anything.” Sandra occasionally glanced at Tanner and Lynette, or sometimes her daughter, but mostly her eyes hung on either her glass of water on the table or the scenery outside the patio. She was better now. No more tears, no more apologies for crying. The months since the end of the war and the occupation settled back in. “They didn’t take over every little thing immediately. They didn’t have the people for that. But you’d wonder if the police were taking care of us or taking their orders from NorthStar, and you’d see different faces in the media and not know who or why. Even with local news and familiar faces, you’d wonder: are they just doing their best they can with what they’ve got like all the rest of us, or is this collaboration?”

“They pretended to have a light hand, but of course they rounded people up in the night,” said Terry, Madelyn’s father. “Sometimes just for intimidation. Sometimes they held people for a long time. They played up corporate conduct rules and standards they didn’t really follow. And they looted half the planet. It happened all through the occupation. They put us all on that bullshit corporate scrip and said it was to control price gouging and fraud, but they seized every bit of certified currency we had. Anything that would trade outside of Archangel. All kinds of expensive property, too. Jewelry, medicine, tech, you name it. Businesses would close down and someone would come along and strip out all the gear and leave an empty building.’”

“That was a whole plan from the beginning,” said Tanner. “We did prisoner interviews the day we took Beowulf. One of mine turned out to be an ‘auditor.’ They wanted to recoup as much of the cost of the invasion as possible.”

“The whole time, we wondered when it would end, or how,” Sandra continued. “Would the Navy ever attack, were they already basically beaten. We didn’t know the truth of the invasion or the day to day. We knew it couldn’t be over, but if it wasn’t, where was the counterattack? We’ve heard the explanations since then, but people still wonder. Especially with everything that came out right after the war about Aguirre and the pirates and…” She gestured reluctantly at Tanner. “I’m sure you can’t talk about it all.”

“Not everything, but…” His answer faltered. The rest of the table remained largely silent for this conversation, with the rest of the wedding party passing on the cheerful brunch they had planned to make room for this release. At first Tanner thought it was deeply considerate of them all to give Sandra and Terry the space. Now he remembered Madelyn’s precaution: most of this crowd worked in Fleet intelligence. They had a professional interest, too—and Tanner kicked himself for even thinking that way. They’re just people, c’mon.

“It was a war, so everything is all secrets and lies, right?” Lynette spoke up evenly. Tanner blinked at her unexpected rescue. “I only had my little ship, so I can’t tell you what command really thought. But anyplace we dug in and fought for wound up getting smashed. It wasn’t only Bethlehem Station and Michael. Even Raphael took some stray hits in the invasion, and that did a lot of harm. Nobody wanted that to happen to Michael, so we picked every other fight we could instead.”

“Lotsof fights,” Tanner echoed with a grimace. “Good ones, stupid ones, anything to keep up the pressure. Whatever the shady stuff before and during the war, the big picture for Michael was still the same as they say publicly. We didn’t want to inflict another disaster.”

“It means a little more to hear that coming from you. Both of you,” Sandra added.

“They sent people around to ask about you,” Terry told him. “Not immediately. Eventually. I had friends who worked at your school. A couple people from NorthStar interviewed all your old teachers, looked up your friends, pulled all your records and school work thinking nobody would notice. You weren’t the only one, of course, but it stood out.”

“God, that was a switch,” Sandra scoffed. “NorthStar’s people claimed it was all self-defense. Aguirre forced the whole war and it was all his fault. And you went from local hero pirate-fighter to ‘murdered hundreds of suspects’ and ‘instigated the violence on Sheherezade.’ I saw Terry watching it and I said, ‘Wait, isn’t that Madelyn’s little friend with the gerbil petition?’”

Madelyn snorted, then laughed. Tanner groaned, but insincerely. It was a good memory.

“Wait, what?” asked Becky as the mood around the table shifted.

“Our freshman biology teacher had a bunch of lab animals in his classroom,” said Madelyn. “Tanner walked in on the first of class and immediately objected to their living conditions. He objected a lot.”

“They all needed more space and food,” Tanner mumbled, and did not look at Lynette. “It was cruel.”

“So, my first day of class with Tanner has a twenty-minute fight between him and Professor Jenkins,” Madelyn continued, grinning. “And then on day two he stands up and recites the Archangel Animal Care Act, subsection C5 or whatever, until he gets thrown out of class. The petition started on day three.”

“And then Igot dragged into a meeting with the vice principal because you were helping him,” said Sandra.

“I did,” Madelyn agreed. “Tanner wouldn’t back down for anyone. I thought it was cool.”

Tanner felt like he should have a response, but it faltered. Lynette leaned forward at his other side, watching him. “Wow,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you blush before.”

The rest of the table laughed. Tanner accepted it with a shrug. He could think of worse things to be busted over, and it wasn’t like Lynette was mad. “I couldn’t have done it without Madelyn. Everyone else laughed at me until she jumped into it. That made it a cool cause.”

“Did you save the gerbils?” asked Lynette.

“Hell yeah, we saved the gerbils,” said Madelyn.

“And ran that professor out of the whole school,” added Sandra.

Madelyn shrugged. “He should’ve bought some bigger cages.”

“Maybe for you,” said her mother.

Amid the laughter around the table, Tanner risked a glance to his other side. He found exactly the grin he dreaded from Lynette, only now that he looked, he didn’t dread it at all. “This explains so much,” she said.