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I have written about why I do this, who these three men are, and what they share. This is the plainest post yet. If you are deciding whether to start this novel when it launches, here is what you are weighing.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human is one story told in three voices. Waylon Eckermann, carried forward from Refusenik's Island Mine. Scott MacIntyre, from Human Phoenix / Man. And Michael Stewart, from Cold Creek's Defenceman series, by way of my own Parallel Ice. The book spans April 2011 to the summer of 2014, across three acts and roughly 90 chapters. One chapter a week, the same schedule you have followed for the past year.
The structure is a braid. Chapters rotate among the three men on a single shared calendar, so you feel what each is living through while the others are in motion. Waylon is building on Mars, Scott is courting Janie, and Michael is a very busy boy. None of them knows the others exist. The calendar does the patient work of drawing them together, and here is the part I love: if you are reading Defenceman: Parallel Ice right now, you are already inside the story. Its closing chapters and the opening of Cold Human happen weeks apart. You will recognize the season.
What drives it is what drove the originals: loyalty, friendship, chosen family, and the slow work of building something that lasts. Sport and science fiction are the setting, not the point. The threats are real, but they stay where they belong, at the edges. They do not define the world, or these men. The story writes toward the light.
What I owe you, my patient and generous readers, is a story that honors the past while taking these characters places some of you, though perhaps not all, will appreciate. That is the risk of any continuation, and I hope you will enjoy the journey. I write this because I love the work, and because I love hearing from you.
If you are new to any of the three worlds, I have prepared a Companion Guide to publish alongside the novel: summaries of the source books and a character and location codex, enough to walk in cold. That said, the originals are better than any guide I could write, so I strongly encourage you to read Cold Creek and Refusenik directly. They are the reason this story exists.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026.
CCTW
Cold Creek and Refusenik never met, as far as I know. They write in different genres years apart. One builds a hockey story, the other a science fiction saga. On paper, they have almost nothing in common.
I have spent a long time now living inside both their worlds, and I think they are writing about the same man.
Cold Creek gives us Michael Stewart. A Defenceman whose decency is never mistaken for softness, who takes his life off and on the ice seriously, and keeps earning his next chapter by staying true to his moral compass. By any measure, Michael could have become the entitled athlete and showboat. The successful hockey star, the international male model, the tech guru: any one of those would turn most people insufferable. He never does. He always tries to lift the people around him rather than make them smaller for his success.
Refusenik gives us Waylon Eckermann and Scott MacIntyre. A Navy man who builds a nation, and a Marine who runs a bar in West Texas and wants nothing more than Janie's love and to be a good man. Neither of them performs competence, and yet they are the most capable people in any room.
That is the thread. All three stay below the radar by choice, not by limitation. Each of them could take up more space, and each chooses to avoid the spotlight. Waylon and Scott share military service, while Michael, a civilian, shows the same commitment to others in his every action. All three have an innate understanding of duty, and a habit of putting others above themselves. They help their friends because that is who they are. The principle is the engine, not the performance.
That is rarer than it sounds. Cold Creek and Refusenik both ask the harder question: what does a good man do when his life grows beyond anything he planned for?
When I started writing The Vallis Defense, I assumed I was beginning from separate universes that I would somehow have to merge. I was mistaken. Scott, Waylon, and Michael are never that far apart. Put the three of them together and they know each other within minutes, because two writers who value integrity build the same sort of man.
That recognition is why this book exists. Not the plot, but that these three belong in one story, and always did.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026.
CCTW
Last time I wrote about why I do this. This time I want to introduce the men the new novel follows.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human has three protagonists who do not know each other.
Waylon Eckermann, sovereign of Free Vallis on Mars, a Navy veteran. Refusenik's readers will know him from Island Mine. The novel opens in April 2011, several years after the Chinese attack that put him on Mars, with Waylon reading the eight names on a placard beside a mourning flag with eight added stars.
Scott MacIntyre from Levall, West Texas. Marine veteran, scout sniper, bar owner. Refusenik's readers will know him from Human Phoenix and Human Man. The novel finds him in 2011 running a bar called the Black Horse, with a colorful group of friends and a new fiancée at his side.
Michael Stewart. Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Michael Stewart Cold Creek built, a few years on from where the Defenceman series left him. Readers of Defenceman: Parallel Ice will see how he has matured. AEGIS is growing, old relationships are still close, and new ones are about to walk in.
Three men, three worlds about to collide.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes in July 2026. More soon.
One last thing, unrelated to the novel. Michael Loucks, one of the best and most prolific writers on Stories Online (SOL), is leading a discussion called "Use of AI (nuances)" that is worth reading if the topic interests you. Wherever you land on the use of AI in writing, what stands out is the civility of the discourse. Opinions get expressed, ideas exchanged, and people listen to each other without belittling. This is what makes SOL special.
CCTW
I did not set out to write fan fiction.
I found it the way most people do, through a story that ended too soon. Someone built a world I wanted to stay in, and then they stopped, and I did not know what to do with that. So, I started writing.
First, I read Greg Younger's Stupid Boy, which led to SmokinDriver's Nick series. By the time Cold Creek launched the Defenceman series, I had invested enough to read every chapter on the day it posted. Michael Stewart was a character you did not encounter very often, someone whose decency was not a weakness and whose story kept earning its next chapter. The collegiate career, the Olympic arc, and how Cold Creek took matters off the ice as seriously as those on it. I was not a casual reader by the time that series ran its course.
Then Refusenik. Island Mine opened a different kind of story, and I wanted more. Waylon Eckermann explored what a decent, principled person does when something extraordinary arrives. Scott MacIntyre, a Marine, operated a West Texas bar. His story posed a subdued version of the same query: what does a man destined for significance do when his fulfilled life faces upheaval? Refusenik was building toward something real with both characters.
And then nothing. Both Cold Creek and Refusenik, within a few years of each other, went quiet. Michael Stewart, Waylon Eckermann, and Scott MacIntyre were all mid-story. I kept checking back. I continued to hope, and to be honest, my hope persists. But at some point, I stopped waiting for their return and started asking a different question.
Not whether I could do what they did. I cannot. I write in my voice, and my voice is not theirs, and the most respectful thing I can offer these characters is honesty about that. Instead, I asked a simpler question: what happens next? Where do Michael Stewart, Waylon Eckermann, and Scott MacIntyre go?
That question is where I live now.
I have been writing in these worlds for a while. Defenceman: Parallel Ice was my attempt to give Michael Stewart's story a proper close before opening something larger. Writing in their worlds is how I say thank you.
A new novel, The Vallis Defense: Cold Human, launches in July. More on that soon.
CCTW
Hi everyone,
Several of you have reached out asking how to read Cold Creek's original Defenceman, DMan2, and DMan3. For a long time the answer was frustrating — all three were locked behind the Premier Only paywall on Stories Online, which meant you either had a paid subscription or you were out of luck.
I just noticed that has changed. All three books are now available to anyone on the site, no subscription required.
What makes this interesting is that Cold Creek's other works on Stories Online are still listed as Premier Only. Only the Defenceman series has changed status. That is not a platform-wide decision — someone made a specific choice about these three books.
I will not pretend I know who made it or why. Maybe it is coincidence. But here is what I want to believe — somewhere out there, Cold Creek is quietly reading along, and decided to open the door so new readers could find the story that started all of this. That would be a generous thing to do. If that is what happened, thank you. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: one of the best hockey stories on this platform is now sitting there, waiting for you.
If you have not read the originals, please do. The Defenceman is where Michael Stewart begins, and Cold Creek built something genuinely special with that character — the voice, the relationships, the world. Everything that came after owes a debt to what Cold Creek put on the page.
Read the originals first. You will not regret it.
Links are below.
CCTW
The Defenceman (Book 1)
Dman2 (Book 2)
Dman3 (Book 3)
Defenceman: Parallel Ice (Book 4)
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