Part of 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
RichardGerald and I wrote this jointly for Bebop and Nora's "50 Ways to Leave your Lover" event. Since one of those options is a bus, we modeled our story on the classic Hollywood 'meet cute' film "It Happened One Night." Which means that we changed the characters, swapped the sexes, radically altered the plot, and wrote a whole new story. But we DID think about the film while we were trashing it. So as the pitchmen would say: It's exactly like the original except on a train and....
The wealthy and powerful play games with peoples lives, and crush those who stand in the way of what they want. But sometimes, just sometimes, they lose.
A Clan Amir of Berant Story
Gerry Mannheim continues to grow and develop in response to the events around him. These stories show many aspects of his maturing attitudes and responses to those events.
Heather Mercer was a junior high school teacher whose life was fine until her husband got in debt to a loan shark. The choices were slim. Allow his organs to be sold on the black market, or become a stripper on the weekends at the club the loan shark owned. Oh, yes. And then there was the sex she had to supply her new boss. Could she get out of it all? Who would save her?
A story set in the Pinwheel Universe
When a shipment of weapons goes missing on a remote mining colony, Agent Boyd is sent to assess the situation. What he uncovers is a plot to take control of the planet, but during his getaway his spaceship is shot down. Stranded on the planet's moon and with only his survival suit at his disposal, he must find a way back to civilization, all while trying to deal with an unwitting alien companion.