Jack of Harts

Stephen Huda is, in my opinion, one of the best CG artists in the business. I discovered him many years ago after seeing some of his contract work for another property, and loved his style enough that I tracked him down and asked him if he would put his spin on my designs. He has created the base image used in every story I’ve published, and I believe I can attribute part of my success as an author to just how awesome those covers look.

This is his latest work, created for The Gemini Affair, a short story I’ve written for the upcoming sci-fi anthology, An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires. It’s on kickstarter right now if you’re interested. There’s a little snippet underneath the link if you’re interested…

An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires Kickstarter

They were three lightyears short of Gateway when the overstressed grav sensors finally gave out. The alarms woke Captain Jack from sleep and he rolled out of his bed with windmilling arms and snapped his eyes open. He turned to consult a wall panel and the display told him the grim truth without delay.

“Well, that’s just shiny,” Jack muttered in disgust. “Betty, please tell me you updated the Pleiades Cluster map when we were on Bosphorus?” he asked and hoped she wouldn’t say, “I told you so”. They really should have stopped for repairs there. But people paid a premium for fast deliveries, and he wanted that bonus.

“Of course,” Betty said with a voice dripping with sarcasm that said, “I told you so” just fine as she appeared next to him.

Jack turned and looked right through her. She was her normal blonde haired, blue eyed, Scandinavian beauty today, and her favorite yellow sundress would have had a young Jack drooling back on the lakes of Northern Minnesota. But he could see the hard edges where her digital body didn’t quite mesh with the analog world around her, and the bulkhead was just barely visible through the slightly harder light created by their ship’s holographic emitters.

“Can you display it, please?” Jack asked the cybernetic intelligence that kept his ship flying.

“Of course,” she answered with a laugh and a three dimensional star map filled the air in front of him.

Jack cringed as he saw it and remembered again why he disliked the Pleiades Cluster. It was a region of space less than a hundred lightyears across with over one thousand stars crammed into it. That might not sound too bad at first, but the outer regions of the cluster weren’t much more dense than open space. It was when you got close to the center that things got crowded. Betty’s map showed a region of space only ten lightyears across, and hundreds of stars filled it from top to bottom and side to side. And just to make things even more fun, one or two hundred of them were a fuzzy brown that denoted their classification as brown dwarves. They were tiny little stars that didn’t put out enough light to be easily seen, so their approximate locations on the map were…approximated far too vaguely for Jack’s comfort. Their gravitic effects on hyper were much less than a normal star, which made them harder to detect, but bouncing too close to one was still a death sentence for any ship.

And this ship’s grav sensors had packed it all in and taken a permanent vacation. They’d probably said some bad things about one Captain Jack as they walked away, too. The kind of stuff that gets censored from stories meant for polite reading.

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