Hey all, it’s an anthology release day! Troy Rising, edited by John Ringo & Gray Rinehart, is available everywhere books are sold. Melissa Olthoff and I teamed up (again) to write a short story about cattle rustlin’ in space (sort of).

Here’s the opening…make sure you pick up the anthology to get the rest of the story.

SKEETERS

Jason Cordova & Melissa Olthoff

“This right here is some bullshit, ma’am.”

Josepha Cruz, coxswain of the Myrmidon cargo shuttle 11242—affectionately christened Maslow’s Hammer by its four-person crew—glanced up from the control console, a frown on her pale features. Next to her, her engineer was softly cursing up a storm in Spanish.

“What’s up?” she asked.

Maslow’s Hammer had been deep in the E Eridani system for two weeks now after the final Rangoran attack, collecting whatever scrap they could find at the behest of Apollo Mining. From the look of things, humanity had almost lost the battle and the system. Almost, as the old axiom went, only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades.

On the other hand, the Rangora had both their navy and spirit shattered against the surface of the massive battlestation Thermopylae. The aggressive alien invaders had lost, and recovery operations were underway. Both Troy and Thermopylae were swamped, with the majority of their shuttles destroyed when the Rangora made their final, desperate push.

From the vacuum of space came opportunity for independent cargo shuttles like Maslow’s Hammer. Myrmidon shuttles were prohibitively expensive and very few people could actually afford to buy one outright. However, since Tyler Vernon—the man who’d built the SAPL, saved Earth multiple times from alien threats, and was arguably the richest person in the history of the planet—was also a forward-thinker, many smaller, upstart companies were granted the opportunity to lease-to-own them at reasonable rates.

Her family, former ranch hands living near the Red River in north Texas and struggling to keep themselves fed after the destruction of Dallas, had immediately jumped at the opportunity. They’d never looked back.

Make sure you pick up your copy!