Brenda Cooper

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Excerpt

The floor in the reclamation plant slanted under Onor’s feet, forcing him to use the metal handrail to pull himself along the wall beside the water tanks. After the gravgen failures, his hands shook. He needed something to hold onto anyway, even though nothing worse than a banged knee had actually happened to him. Yet. The screams of stressed metal intake tubes above his head had softened to groans and mutterings. They were still louder than the strident but muffled sirens coming from the far part of the ship.

Both made him want out of the corridor he was in quite badly.

Maintenance bots slid by on their own little strip of walkway, one of them clearly needing a lube job. From time to time, gray-water sluiced through a pipe, burbling and rushing toward the hold where it would be trapped by plastine seals before it was allowed into the tanks. The corridor smelled of grease and damp and disinfectant.

The heavy metal door at the end of the corridor looked wrong. He searched around the edges where the door met the frame. Intact. But still wrong. The angle? There. The walkway he stood on had pulled slightly away from the wall in the corner, leaving an opening into blackness. Although the opening wasn’t big enough for him to see through it, he knew from his early training that a maintenance level ran beneath the water plant.

He held his breath and jumped lightly, testing.

The walkway creaked, and held.

He reached carefully for the metal hand grip on the door and pulled. Nothing.

Onor glanced behind him. He had come far enough he couldn’t hear water dripping any more, and none rose through the floor. Yet.

Bio

I'm a Seattle area author, and I love to meet the students each year and – in many cases – read their work as they become professional authors themselves. I mix up technology, writing, and a tech day job, and from time to time I also manage to get in a long bike ride and walk the family dogs.

Publications

My most current novel is Mayan December from Prime Books. My next novel will be The Creative Fire, from Pyr. That's what the excerpt above is from.

Writing Description

Science fiction primarily, spiced with fantasy, and an occasional mainstream story or poem.

Writing Goals

I'll be wanting to get a minimum of 6,000 words a week done on the novel I'm working on, and for my stretch goal, I'd like to finish a song from the book (the book features a singer) or a poem every week of the Write-a-thon.


Website

www.brenda-cooper.com


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