Free This Old Rock by G. David Nordley Page B

can’t save me.” And he pushed her towards the
shuttle. “Just go!”
    It was futile, they both knew it. Regardless, Liz focused.
She could not give up completely. How close could she come to getting away?
    Prepare for immediate lift off as soon as I get in the
hatch, she told the shuttle. Without David’s weight, she reached the
shuttle as the debris curtain spread overhead. The trick would be to get
between that and the blast wave.
    The ladder hung out of the hatch. David got up, at last, and
tried to run toward her.
    “Hurry!” she screamed.
    He tripped over a small rock and fell. He picked himself up.
A second lost. “I’m going to be the martyr here, Liz. Get lost!”
    A strange orange light flooded the horizon. She turned. Ah,
yes. This was it. She sent what she saw streaming into the net. Roiling clouds
zoomed toward the zenith as if in a time-lapse video of normal weather. It
glowed. Everything glowed. She felt like she was in an oven.
    Air slammed into her and sent her skyward, the shuttle and
David tumbling nearby. She felt surreal.
    Hot—very, very hot. Her visor melted, bowed in, a blowtorch
played on her face. Everything went dark. She took a last breath, a breath of
pure fire. She willed herself to take it deep, so as not to prolong the pain. So
I pass into legend.
     
     
    THE BLACK HOLE
PROJECT
    by G. David Nordley
and C. Sanford Lowe
    available
in Kindle
ebook and print
    at Amazon.com
     
     
    Continue reading for a sample chapter of
    TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUNTAIN
    by G. David Nordley

To Climb a Flat
Mountain: Chapter 1
Somewhere Unexpected
 
    Jacques Song opened his eyes and saw a huge fish floating
above the canopy of his cold sleep unit and staring at him. He shut them
immediately; it must be a bad dream. People often had dreams as cold sleep
evolved into normal sleep and wakefulness.
    Last night, 21 June 2345, he and the rest of the corps had
listened to some inspirational nonsense from Earth Empress Marie, lifted a
glass of rum spiked with cold sleep preparation drugs, and dutifully lain down
on their hotel beds at Sheffield Station in Earth orbit.
    In deep sleep, they’d been transferred to Cold Sleep Units
and loaded onto starships bound for 36 Ophiuchi. The process would be reversed
twenty-three years later when the invasion force had established itself,
hopefully undetected, at a base in the Kuiper belt around 36 Ophiuchi A and B.
Their mission was to liberate a colony gone horrifically wrong.
    But that colony was not under a sea filled with staring
fish.
    The colony leaders didn’t believe in using robots–labor
cleansed the soul. Slavery in all but name had evolved in a decade. Polygamy,
child marriage, gladiatorial executions and inherited subordinate status became
the rule. They’d bungled relations with primitive aliens on another of 36
Ophiuchi A’s planets, raising concerns about humanity’s status in the galaxy.
    But those aliens did not, as he remembered, look like fish.
    Dissenters had fled to the hills and risked everything to
call for help–which would take half a century at best to get there. Before 36
Ophiuchi, the consensus had been that the distance between stars made
interstellar warfare impossible. The colony leaders had counted on it.
    But faced with a cry for help, Earth considered the impossible.
There’d been a mammoth debate informed by massive simulations showing that,
absent outside influence, the theocracy might persist indefinitely. The
decision had been made, volunteers recruited, and robots instructed to prepare
a fleet. Jacques, divorced and looking for distance, had signed up.
    Jacques opened his eyes again, and the fish was still there,
all too real. Maybe two meters long, it boasted a huge parrot-like beak, but
otherwise looked something like a shark. He was wide awake now. He was
obviously not on the conveyor ship, Resolution , so something else had gone horrifically wrong.
    He tried to touch the net, but the lack of response didn’t
surprise him. The