Well, today’s the day the campaign officially ends.

I’m sorry we didn’t reach the necessary milestones to see Inkshares publication, but I’m not surprised.  I still think their price-per-book was higher than it needs to be, and their crowdfunding goals are, likewise, higher than necessary;  but don’t worry, this isn’t the end of this project, even if it’s the end of it here at Inkshares. 

I’ll be continuing my work on Over The Stars (and other projects), and continuing to post previews, at my Patreon (link) if you’d like to hop aboard over there.  Your patronage would be greatly appreciated!

You should all receive your Inkshares funding pledges back, very shortly. You’ll have another chance to pick up this first novel (and at a lower price ;) ) before too long.  My Patreon and my Goodreads (link) author blog will be the best places to check in, along with my Facebook (link, and don’t freak out, that’s me, I just by Rusty instead of Russell). 

Feel free to stay in touch, and I’ll be posting more updates when I can, via those other outlets!

Thank you all for your support during this crowdfunding attempt, and I’m sorry it didn’t make it, but I’m eager to get the ball rolling again and get this story out there.

--Russell Zimmerman

Hi all, just a quick update this time around -- no fiction, sorry! -- to let folks know we’re still chugging along, we’re up to a whopping 59 pre-orders (yay), and things are still progressing.  I had plenty of excuses for a slower update (I had a family member visiting (hi mom) for a while, we were out of town a little bit, yadda yadda yadda), but mostly it’s that with the contest itself being over, my update schedule’s going to slow down a bit.  Partially it’s to give myself a break, but also so I don’t just spam the heck outta you readers.

For the next little bit, my plan is weekly updates, with maybe every other one featuring some more preview fiction.  I’m not sure how many folks are even reading ’em (I’m not crazy about the text-dump format, myself, and I bet it’s a real bear on a phone or a tablet), but I also don’t want to share half the book while we’re here for the next two months of campaigning! 

Thanks for all the support and interest so far, and let’s keep it up!   Keep sharing and telling your friends, it’s greatly appreciated.

Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, say hi to me on Facebook or Twitter, and get a dialogue going! 

--RRZ

[We’re going to jump right into the introductions here, mid-chapter, in order to keep y’all from having to read a couple thousand more words in this ’update readers’ format.  As before, apologies for any formatting issues introduced by copy-pasting it over here, and remember this is an early draft, so names may change well before publication.  Enjoy!  --RRZ]

“And here, representing the technological innovation and elbow-grease of our proud Democratic Federation Army, is the twenty-fifth season’s first contestant! Corporal Madeline Jane, DemFed Army!”

She looked like just a speck on the screen, spread-eagled like the rest, falling.  There was a rippling grav-chute behind her slowing her descent, heightening the anticipation of their proper, Army, boots-on-the-ground arrival.

“Corporal Jane is a combat engineer,” and here, alongside Randy’s over-excited voice, the basics of her personnel file scroll onto the screen, age, height, weight, years in-service. “Hailing from a mid/heavy-grav world, and a proud graduate of basic and advanced combat training from the Neros Cluster’s Army Pioneer School, Jane isn’t only our first contestant this season, she’s our first blue-lister!”

“The Army’s not afraid to serve up their reserve options to our show, Randy.  They always insist that their first choices aren’t their only qualified contestants,” Danny cuts in with a lopsided smile. The Marine veteran’s smile always turns lopsided when she’s talking about the Army. “And they’re not shy about showcasing non-coms, instead of officers, either!”

The in-screen pictures scrolled through a series of short Jane videos—her pink hair shaved up high on the sides, lazily swept back on top—with her face alternately smudged with grease or streaked with camo-paint, sharply uniformed or crawling in the mud, smiling at the camera or scowling like she was here to murder the competition. The scowl looks more at home on her tanned face.

Jane’s data is slid into the first column—TECH—on the smartcast screen, just before she’s allowed to drop out of the picture, distortion in the air above and behind her from her grav-chute, and the next speck is hauled into focus.

“Next up? The Army’s tactical specialist for this season, Sergeant Iskander Isaac!” Another zoomed-in spec, another stream of data, another montage of combat, parade, and training scenes. Isaac was almost half-again as tall as Jane, with the rangy build of a low-grav worlder and skin a shade darker than Mosi Randhawa’s. He also, in every vid-clip they could manage it, was carrying a big, big, gun.

“The Sergeant—“

“Another non-com, bold move!” Danny cut in.

“The Sergeant is a specialist in recon and marksmanship, with four years in-service with the New Kanos Rangers. His jacket is filled with confirmed kills from sev—“

“We’ll see how he stacks up to a Marine Scout/Sniper later this season, Randy,” Danny interrupted with another lopsided smile. Within seconds, her Flitcast ratings climbed almost four points.

“Ha-hah,” after another well-practiced laugh from Randhawa, and the camera slid to the next leaper against the perfect New Hibernian sky. The TACTICAL column filled with Isaac’s information as the next contestant fell into focus.

“And representing the Army in the skies is Lieutenant Baptiste Presley. A close-support pilot hailing from the Nine-Twenty-First, ‘Antarean Cutters,’ he’s not quite made ace yet, but three kills is still impressive for a—“

This time it wasn’t Danny’s anti-Army bravado that interrupted Randhawa’s announcement, it was his own wide eyes, his own genuine reaction, his own disbelieving glance from screen to screen; the cameras were working hard to track the next contestant’s grav-chute descent because he wasn’t in a grav-chute descent.

In clear focus, the falling—plummeting, really—figure was flapping his arms, scissor-kicking his legs, flailing to stay right-side-up. The formation was ruined, the neat line of contestants turned as jagged as a dip in ratings.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Danny spoke over Randy eagerly, eyes lighting up. Drama already. “It appears one of our Low Protectors is having trouble with his grav-chute, now. My Skyborne training was quite a while ago—“

She waited for Randy’s well-practiced chuckle, but didn’t get one. He was staring at the monitors, pupils pinpricks.

“—but, err, I’m sure that even in the Army, they’re trained to deploy a reserve chute. Stay with us, please, citizens, as we look into remote operation options, or…”

Or the show’s first season-opening fatality, her tongue flicked across her lips.

Lens-drones whirred and buzzed, straining to keep the fast-falling contestant in clear focus, only for a second figure—wearing the same gray jump-suit—to streak into the picture and body-tackle the first, mid-air. There was no grav-chute distortion behind either of them, now, and they spun, twisted, and fell in a tangle of limbs. The show’s Flitcast ratings were sky-rocketing as fast as the young soldier was falling.

“We’re getting word now that a—is this right?—that a Lunar Guard contestant seems to have deactivated their ‘chute, it seems, in order to break formation, and…”

One waving arm emerged from the tangle of limbs, elbow jerking back like a hydro-farmer starting up an old pull-engine unit by yanking on the cord.

“And there we go!” Danny’s smile was flawless, Randy’s whoop filled the airwaves of a billion listeners. The tumbling Army contestant jerked out of the picture, appearing to rise compared to the fall of their life-saver. “That’s deployed the reserve grav-chute of that contestant—flagged as Army, yes, according to our trackers—and any second, we hope that…there we are!”

After a stabilizing spread eagle, angling their fall a safe distance away, the rescuer’s own secondary grav-chute deployed. The formation was a wreck, but none of the show’s producers would complain. They’d just gotten more drama out of the first five minutes of flashcast than ever before in the show’s history. A short montage of a young man in a flight suit and helmet, a combat vacc suit, or the cockpit of an in-atmo gun-cutter flashed onto the screen, along with a hurried stream of basic data.

“Our Lunar Guard contestant—sorry, we’re trying to get that data ready for a flashcast—has also safely deployed their own reserve grav-chute, and, ah, we’ll be able to tell you more shortly.”

Anticlimactically, the FLIGHT column filled with Lieutenant Presley’s information.

“Bear with us for a moment folks, as we re-align our cameras and check tracker codes to see who our mid-air hero was!” Danny’s smile was gorgeous, eyes bright. ‘Captain X’ loved a good story, and she’d just gotten one.

“While we prepare to announce our Lunar Guard contestants—including our falling friend with the level-head!—please enjoy a word from our sponsors, and remember that tonight’s Low Guard are entering the field aboard a Mustang Dynamics Morgan-class; good enough for them, good enough for you!”

Fade. Cut to commercials. The show-runners knew their business; segueing directly to advertisements, straight from a crisis where half the universe’ adrenaline had spiked at the prospect of an on-air death, would do wonders for affiliated sales.

It was drama like that that kept The Protectors on top.

[Check back in for a few more excerpts, introducing the rest of this season’s contestants!   Thanks for your continued support, and please keep spreading the word! --RRZ]

[Bear in mind, dear backers, that this is all early draft stuff, and that I’m also suffering some formatting issues by copy-pasting it into an ’update’ like this;  things may change a bit when you see them in the actual pages! --RRZ]

Heron-class shuttles weren’t particularly graceful craft, despite their curves and Zhang-Singh Synergies pricetags. They were workhorses, lean, smooth-flying, equipped to handle a little atmo travel, a little in-system travel, and quite a bit of easy, fast, docking with larger vessels and spaceports. They were prized for their fuel efficiency, their spacious cargo bays and comfortable passenger compartments, and their namesake segmented, retractable, docking ramps, that made their job easy. The placement of those ramps—fore, above the bridge, yet another design decision to speed up the docking process—afforded pilots and ventral passengers a lovely view.

As the Goodnight, this particular shuttle, fired maneuver thrusters to swing about and begin its descent, then, the passengers had not only a lovely view, but an exceptional one; the planet they were ferrying towards, New Hibernia, was a jewel of DemFed space. A shining, deep blue, jewel.

Diego Patoyari, skipper of the Goodnight, sipped his coffee and smiled into his mustachios—splendid ones, if you asked him—while his passengers enjoyed that view. Even Andersen’s sloppy turn and too-heavy hand on the auxiliary thrusters couldn’t wreck the trip for him. Patoyari’d seen his fair share of worlds, working his way up the ranks from Able Spacer. He’d been from one end of DemFed space to the other, and border-hopped into PML territory a time or two, when the profit margins justified the risk. Yes, he’d seen a lot of worlds, but few so pretty.

Humanity had scattered like billiards balls after the Burning, fleeing Earth in whatever direction would get them away from their ideological opposites, and in all the hundreds of years since then, they’d never quite recaptured Terra’s old majesty, never quite hit the sweet spot. Patoyari, and spacers like him, had seen worlds just as big, certainly, and worlds with temperatures as welcoming, environments as comfortable, oceans as full of life, skies as blue, grounds as fertile, darkness cycles as regular and psych-friendly. Humanity had found and occupied worlds with flora as cultivable, fauna as docile, atmospheres as breathable, solar power as abundant.

But they hadn’t ever found all of it at once. Not in all the worlds the DemFeds or the PLM had, nor even the scatter-shot of two-bit moons on the edges of explored space, not anywhere, had they found anyplace they were so clearly meant to be as the home they’d wrecked and fled.

But New Hibernia? Oh, she came close.

Initial notes from the ECC—the Exploratory/Colonization Corps—had, generations earlier, tagged it as an Eden-class world in every category save size. She was small, New Hibernia was, which had led to her name; she was just a little island in space, compared to most worlds. She didn’t look it while you had a talentless hack of an Able Spacer-Limited at the helm, like Andersen—everything looked big behind a helmsman you didn’t trust not to run into it—but New Hibernia’s glaring flaw was her size. She was dense enough the gravity displacement wasn’t hard to adapt to, but even ripe as she was, teeming with life and rich with extremes of Terra-quality weather, she’d never supply the resources to host a proper hab-colony, nothing designed to encourage the fecundity of humankind, to host a swelling, not struggling, population.

No, she was a garden world, New Hibernia. During periods of her history, as the DemFed had grown and stabilized, as the economy rose with populations, she’d been a vacation planet, a safari location, a recreational destination. Her poles offered ice-climbing and comfortably small cold-weather resorts, her equatorial band supplied arid grasslands and beachfronts, her narrow midlands temperate rocky terrain and craggy hills, and her ample oceans—nearly sixty-four percent of her surface area—offered a sense of familiarity to those longing after a mini-Terra, rich oxygen, and that blue marbled look that humans adored in their home worlds. Her small size meant easy shuttling to any or all of the above in just a few hours. She was a princess among garden worlds.

None of that—nor even the view—was why the skipper was ignoring Andersen’s execrable piloting, though, and smiling into his fabulous mustachios. No, Patoyari was smiling because humanity had found a use for New Hibernia other than as a resort world for the idly wealthy. Something—somehow—even more lucrative for humble Heron-class shuttle jockeys like him had come along. It wasn’t just home to the jaded rich and their hunting and tour guides, lifeguards and life coaches, no.

It was a set. All of it. The wildly fluctuating weather, the disparate regional climates, the harsh, natural, beauty; it all made New Hibernia the perfect set for a very specific type of show.

It was the host-world to The Protectors, making it one of the most famous, most profitable, planets in all of DemFed space. The Terran-standard eight month cycle was about to begin anew, the twenty-fifth season was about to begin. Prefab buildings, grav-tanks, medical equipment, uniforms, recording equipment, broadcasting gear, weapons, ammunition; all had been shuttled down to the surface, along with the first wave of seasonally-invading technicians and engineers, sound experts, lighting experts, drone mechanics, caterers, personal trainers, and makeup artists. The show was about to start.

Broadcasting just twenty-fours behind live—leaving staff and crew struggling with a brutal editing and splicing schedule, and Patoyari a bustling shuttle trade to and from the support cruisers and stations in close-orbit—The Protectors was the most popular, most important, most perpetually-hectic show in known space. Flash-cast updates from the show interrupted and overrode politicians, emergency reports trumped all standard broadcasting, casting calls aired free on every major network. For two and a half decades, The Protectors had broadcast to the people of the Democratic Federation of Worlds, showing them their children, their champions, and everything in between, as their chosen few struggled in the mud and blood of advanced military training, the sweat and tears of competition, and the crystal-clear waters of New Hibernia.

DemFed credits rolled in by the billion, by the trillion, on this backwater too-little world, in support of the show. She was still a garden world, still a vacation destination in the off-season. Catapulted to intergalactic superstardom by the show, fans and tourists swarmed the place in droves the third of the Terran-standard world that it was available for citizenry to enjoy. Holo-capping themselves flexing over The Beast or splashing ashore at Nuevo Normandy, smiling to distant family from a guided tour of Base Camp, adventurously daring the Fangs, or taking a day trip into out into the Salts, tourists loved everything about New Hibernia, but the tiny sliver of fame, the brush with stardom, most of all.

But that was just the off season. Standard shuttle rates doubled, when the shooting started.

Filming began tomorrow. Skipper Patoyari’s Goodnight was ferrying in some of the last of the gear, some of the least of the crew, some of the first of the later-season necessities. The off season was over. The Protectors was about to begin. New Hibernia was about to be in the spotlight again.

The planet would be kept busier than ever, but at the same time comparatively Spartan and barren; all this crew, for so little cast. Patoyari wouldn’t shuttle them, no. The hosts had private ships, private transportation, private schedules to keep. And the contestants? The contestants always had a more dramatic entrance to make, nothing at all like a quiet, comfortable, ride aboard a simple Heron-class. Patoyari finished his coffee, still smiling, still blithely ignoring Andersen’s ineptitude.

Quiet, comfortable, and expensive, he amended.