“How long before Captain Childe admits that we’re stranded?”

Jason held his peace, not wanting to criticize the captain. Already lines had been drawn, separating the seven living crew members from the colonists. Andrax was supernumerary, a Scout hitching a free ride from Banex to Aleph Prime via New Harmony. He did not fit either classification but Jason was thankful to have him aboard. How they could hope to survive without his professional expertise was a question he preferred not to face.

“Well,” Jan continued, “if the announcement hasn’t been made yet, I intend to explore those so called ruins tomorrow. Once Childe starts ferrying down colonists, there won’t be any time. Want to come along?”

Jason said that he did, but later, as sounds from the temporary jungle that surrounded them kept him awake, he wondered why.

***

The landing craft descended with the sunrise, carrying half a dozen new colonists. Jan met them at the ramp, giving concise orders and turning them over to their more experienced comrades. There was something vaguely familiar about the fourth colonist, but a closer look did nothing to spark Jan’s memory. The man was named Adrian Dumezil, of indeterminate middle age and pleasant, but undistinguished features. Jan motioned him out of line, for no other reason than that he had caught his eye, and he had already intended to take one of the new colonists with him.

Jason and Dumezil carried packs; Jan did not. It was Jan’s order, strictly enforced, that those whose job it was to guard should not be burdened otherwise. More than one colonist had felt Jan’s anger after relaxing his guard momentarily to help a companion.

It takes only a moment of inattention to bring death on a new planet.

Jan set the pace, stepping out sharply. The land rolled gently and their vision was restricted by the fast-growing bushes, but not so restricted as it would have been even a week earlier. The herds of herbys, trihorns, and humpox had battered and browsed the bushes into a thick, tangled, dying mat.

Jason quizzed Adrian, seeking out the climate of opinion overhead.

“No one knows what to believe,” Dumezil replied. “The official word is that there was a computer malfunction, but rumor says that it was a major explosion and that we are stranded. Frankly, rumor is more convincing.” He looked sideways at Jan to ask, “Which is it?”

“Explosion,” Jan answered. Jason winced. “We are here for as long as we survive. Childe is a fool. When he gets around to telling the truth, he will have alienated all the colonists just when he needs them most . . . hit the deck!”

The Scout’s sudden change of tone caught his companions flat-footed. Jan had already gone to cover beneath a siskal bush with his express pistol at the ready. Jason and Dumezil tumbled in to join him.

There was a rustling in the brush and a coughing grunt, then a group of trihorns came into sight. They were magnificent beasts, fully two meters high at the shoulders with shaggy manes sloping away to low, naked rumps. Their heads were massive and sported a single central horn projecting forward and trifurcating, one point up and two down.

They were mammals, of course. Hair, live birth, warm blood, and suckling are all characteristics evolved in just such a harsh, cold climate. It was clearly a family group: a monstrous bull, an uddered female with two hornless suckling calves at her side, and a monopointed adolescent.

The three men remained motionless until they had passed. more tomorrow

It had been a close thing for D’Angelo – a two-shot weapon simply was not adequate for an untamed world.

Jason wiped blood from his face. It had been that close. Express pistols were a specialty tool issued only to Scouts. By twisting a dial with his off hand, Jan could tailor projectile size and velocity to the target at hand. If the dial was not touched the maximum charge was sufficient to stop a terrestrial elephant three times over. Jan had not dialed.

Jason searched for an appropriate response to the situation, but could only say, lamely, “Thanks.”

Jan smiled, but his eyes never left the perimeter of the clearing. “When I was scouting on Lando, I nearly got myself killed a couple of times, and – you know what? You never get used to it.

“However, you do learn not to let it throw you off. Put it out of your mind and get back to watching so that I can help get this carcass back to base.”

Stung, Jason turned his attention back to duty. They slung the field-dressed herby on a pole and returned to camp, passing through the tangle field that so far had kept the native carnivora at a reasonable distance.

The landing craft was in orbit, having carried up a load of meat to feed the colonists on the Lydia. In the early years of star travel each ship had been a self-contained ecosystem, but with the advent of the Synapse and nearly instantaneous interstellar travel, ships turned to processed food and mechanical recirculation of air and water. Three weeks in orbit had completely exhausted the Lydia’s food stores.

Jan Andrax dropped onto a camp stool made from the stems of a tough, fast-growing bush and began scraping from his boots the mucilaginous substance exuded by the local ground cover. Jason relinquished his rifle and another pair of colonists left to hunt. Hunting was a full-time occupation for those who had to supply meat to the many overhead.

Jan stopped scraping long enough to assure himself that they were not going to be overheard, then asked, “Any word on the computer?” Jason shook his head. Jan swept the area about him with a searching look before returning to his boots. Jason realized that he probably was not even aware of that mannerism. Jan was a Scout, trained for just such an environment; Jason was the ship’s astrogator. He had never felt more out of place or useless.

“They’ll never fix the computer,” Andrax continued. “You know that, don’t you?” Jason nodded. Both of them had seen the computer bay after the explosion. The Synapse jump had lasted over four seconds; the longest previous jump, under carefully controlled conditions, had been of less than a second’s duration and it had driven a ship clear outside the galactic lens. Instantaneous travel had its complications. “Jase, how long before Captain Childe comes to his senses and announces to the colonists that this is to be their new home – and ours?”

“It’s awfully hard for him to accept.”

“Humph. It’s hard for me to accept. This is one hell of a final landfall, but facts are facts.” more tomorrow

Jason D’Angelo was on watch, his 10~mm double-barreled rifle cradled across his arm, when the leer broke cover. He heard its splayed webbed feet splatting on the muddy ground before he saw it. Lucien Dubois saw it at the same time and leaped back from the carcass he was gutting, bringing his knife up in futile defense.

Jason fired as the leer began its final rush toward the unprotected colonist. The leer staggered and turned on his new tormentor. Blood discolored the bird’s iridescent pink feathers, but did nothing to slow its charge. Jason aimed more carefully this time and shot it fair in the chest, just left of its massive sternum. The leer went down like a felled tree and Jason broke open his rifle.

The dead leer’s mate broke cover before he had time to reload. Jason spun around in time to see the bird explode soundlessly, scattering flesh and entrails across the clearing. For a moment Jason was too stunned to react, then he realized that Jan Andrax stood beside him holding his express pistol.

“You’d better finish reloading, Jase,” he said and turned away. Jason punched two new shells into the breech of his rifle and was grateful that there was no one to see how his fingers trembled.

Andrax swallowed hard. It had been a close thing for D’Angelo and through no fault of his own. The lO-mm rifle was part of a small consignment for New Harmony; it was designed for simplicity and reliability, not firepower. A two-shot weapon simply was not adequate for an untamed world.

He holstered his express pistol. Dubois had returned to gutting the herby, but the violence of his motions showed the degree to which he had been frightened. That was good; the fright was inevitable but he continued to function in spite of it. Jan made no move to aid him, but continued to scan the surrounding bushes.

*****

I’ll say this from time to time since readers may discover this serial at any point. I am making my comments under the assumption that many of my readers are new or would-be writers and want the nuts-and-bolts behind the story.

As I said yesterday in the other blog, brevity was the order of the day when Jandrax was written. Books were short and you had to talk fast to get your story in. I think I overdid it sometimes.

The technique used here is called in medias res, literally, into the middle of things. It works here because the prolog and few previous paragraphs have already told us, in large, where we are. The action in the first two paragraphs tells us more specifically where we are without slowing the story for landscape description.

These first two paragraphs work, but at the beginning of the third paragraph, the second leer comes at Jason (and the reader) too fast, and Jan’s actions come out of nowhere. Jason knows that Jan is nearby; the reader doesn’t. The paragraph should begin Andrax saw the dead leer’s mate . . . Then the reader wouldn’t get lost.

The third sentence in the fifth paragraph should have been saved for later. It slows the narrative.

Don’t expect this point by point exposition to continue. It isn’t sustainable. I insert it here because this is a classic case of a new author, a first book, and a first chapter that isn’t as good as the rest of the book will be.

We all have to start somewhere.

PART I
From the log of Jan Andrax,
Standard Year 873 and of the colony,
Year 1

These are the bare facts about the planet fate has chosen for our last landfall: diameter somewhat smaller than Earth, day 21 hours, year 312 Earth-standard days (a little over 356 planet days), axial tilt 32°, considerably more than Earth, resulting in greater seasonal variation. Orbital ellipticity considerably greater as well, reinforcing that effect.

Damn!

Chapter 1

The planet hung like a cold jewel in the viewport – the last planet most of them would ever see from orbit. Great icecaps stretched north and south, coursing together to touch hands at the equator along the one major north-south-tending mountain range. Of course the world was uncharted. The stars hanging beyond it were arrayed in a manner utterly strange.

The planet’s oceans were gone – locked into the massive polar caps – and what remained as seas would be extremely saline. The air would be very dry; it was likely that rain never fell, only winter snows.

A cold, barren, forbidding world hanging close in to a cool sun.

*****

(Dear reader, If you just want to read Jandrax and enjoy the story, no one will force you to go beyond the five asterisk barriers. What lies below, on this and many other posts, is for the geeks and nerds and new writers and would-be writers who want to pull back the curtain and see the wizard exposed.)

*****

This is how we do it in science fiction. Log entries, printouts stuck into journals, and excerpts from contemporary writing are all ways of getting information to the reader as quickly and painlessly as possible. You have to be careful, of course. These cliches are part of the DNA of science fiction, but so is their overuse. Don’t do too much of it. Unexpected, humanizing touches like the Damn! at the end of the log entry can sometimes help. Don’t overdo that, either.

And don’t be so careful that you mess up the flow of narrative. Here is a painful example – painful to me, that is; I’m sure no reader ever noticed it. In the first sentence the words “most of them” should have been “they”. I knew there was going to be a one-character exception to the statement, but I didn’t have to be so tediously accurate. It comes from all those master’s theses and academic papers.

In fact, fighting back academic speech is an ongoing struggle. Natural speech doesn’t come naturally to me, and the problem was much worse back when I was writing Jandrax. If I could remove about fifty instances of the word “thus” and replace them with less pretentious words, Jandrax would read more smoothly.

Oh, well, it gives us something to talk about.

Jandrax began with a one page prolog designed to set the scene.

A sphere floating in space, silver against a backdrop of stars.

The stars shift their colors, doppler down, out. The sphere hangs alone in darkness where here and there are concepts yet unborn. Six antennae project; it is not so much moved as displaced. First it is here, then it is there, but it never crosses the space between here and there.

Within the sphere, eight souls are busy taming the nether energies, the Synapse, so that they might emerge from otherwhere in the place of their choosing. One prowls restlessly in a place foreign to his nature, and one moves quietly in the darkness with certainty in his mind and death in his right hand.

The dark figure paused outside the room where the computer split seconds into their million component particles and prepared to extract them from netherwhere. He watched the stars fade out on the screen past Dennison’s sandy head. Only a moment would pass until the stars returned and New Harmony lay below. Synapse drive can cross the galaxy in a heartbeat.

He released the trigger and hurled the grenade.

The explosion echoed through the sphere; Jan Andrax ran toward it. The bomber was gone when he reached the computer bay. Flames roared in the confined space as Staal staggered out, his clothing afire. Jan beat out the flames and leaped in to rescue his partner.

In the control room, Captain Georg Childe heard the explosion and shouted into the com. There was no answer. He tried again, then aborted without further hesitation and the stars returned.

Strange stars.

Synapse drive can cross the galaxy in a heartbeat.

Four seconds had passed.

*****

A lost and stranded starship is not a new concept. MZB used it in Darkover Landfall, her prequel to the Darkover series. Heinlein used it in Starman Jones, although he managed to let his young hero save the day and bring back his ship.

For me it was just a concise way of setting up a situation I wanted to explore. I gave about twenty minutes thought to Synapse drive, whatever that is, because it doesn’t figure into the story after it fails. If I ever need to write another story in this universe and time period (Cyan shares the universe, but takes place before the Synapse is discovered or invented), I’ll have to actually work out how it functions.

Incidentally, did you catch the beginners goof? Between paragraphs three and four I switched from present to past tense for no good reason. Jandrax continues next post.