Write to the Cover, Volume One

By Philip Athans, Phillip Drayer Duncan, Wesley Smith and 4 more

Someone once said that a picture is worth a thousand words....
The cover of this book created entire universes.

In Genre Fiction, the right picture can inspire more than a thousand words. It can give life to brand new worlds, cause valiant heroes and horrific villains to be born, and inspire writers to take action, adventure, and intrigue to brand new heights! That’s what a particular image by artist Adam Shaw inspired and why it now graces the cover of Pro Se Productions’ Write to the Cover: Volume One!

Using Shaw’s wonderful talent and atmospheric, almost haunting image of a robot and its guests as a starting point, seven of today’s best Genre Fiction authors crafted tales of excitement, exploration, and danger! Wayne Carey, Philip Athans, Nick Piers, Joel Jenkins, David J. Fielding, Wesley Smith, and Phillip Drayer Duncan all started with the same piece of art and you will not believe where they each went from there! Marvel at Adam Shaw’s work, then open this book and discover what happens when talented authors Write to the Cover!

Write to the Cover: Volume One from Pro Se Productions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pro Se Press
• Release date: May 24, 2015

Philip Athans

Philip Athans is a fantasy author of numerous titles, including the Baldur's Gate series, the Watercourse Trilogy, and The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

Book preview

WRITE TO THE COVER: VOLUME ONE

Edited by Jessica Fleming and Morgan McKay

Published by Pro Se Press

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this publication are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part or whole of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

Copyright © 2015 Pro Se Productions

Bella Lucky and The Titan of Tarvos © 2015 Philip Athans

The Fox and the Robot © 2015 Phillip Drayer Duncan

The Mad Planet of Dr. Psymn © 2015 Wesley Smith

Sara Saviour and The Galactic Armoury © 2015 Nick Piers

The Warbots of Sulafat © 2015 Joel Jenkins

A Matter of Trust © 2015 Wayne Carey

Let the Future Tell © 2015 David J. Fielding

All rights reserved.

Contents

Bella Lucky and The Titan of Tarvos

by Philip Athans

The Fox and the Robot

by Phillip Drayer Duncan

The Mad Planet of Dr. Psymn

by Wesley Smith

Sara Saviour and The Galactic Armoury

by Nick Piers

The Warbots of Sulafat

by Joel Jenkins

A Matter of Trust

by Wayne Carey

Let the Future Tell

by David J. Fielding

About the Artist

About the Authors

BELLA LUCKY AND THE TITAN OF TARVOS

by

Philip Athans

Constable Bella Lucky couldn’t help but think the bruise around the naked woman’s right eye looked like a nebula—cold and purple. So, Tikhonravov is a southpaw, Bella thought, the bastard.

With her right hand Bella aimed her electroray pistol at the woman. Then with her left hand Bella held a finger in front of her own lips to stop the woman from yelling out an alarm. The woman closed her mouth and offered the barest of nods. Her eyes shifted meaningfully to a door on her right.

Bella returned the nod then let her own eyes shift just as meaningfully to the door on the other side of the room. The woman looked at the door, blanched, then turned back to Bella and shook her head.

Her electroray pistol still leveled on the woman, Bella shrugged and crinkled her brow. The naked woman just blinked at her.

Bella mouthed the words, Why not?

The naked woman didn’t budge. She sat bolt upright behind a little folding card table where she’d been measuring out what looked like a quarter cup at a time of fluorescent orange powder from a big steel mixing bowl into separate plastic bags, then sealing them with a little white plastic gizmo that took all the air out then melted the bags closed. The otherwise bare, gray-walled room stank of burned plastic and…Bella breathed sharply out her nose when she realized what else she was breathing in.

She tried mouthing, Move. Now.

The woman looked at the door to her right again, then her left, then nodded forward, behind Bella, to the door the constable had just come through herself. Bella sighed and tipped her head back just as the rest of the DICE tactical unit started filing in behind her.

Bella shrugged again, and the naked woman took a deep breath and left through the door to her right.

Bella swore under her breath, then barked, Freeze, sister, or I’ll—

But the woman was through the door and it swished closed behind her.

Then a muffled voice from behind the door to Bella’s right: What the hell is going on in there? I thought I—and the door swished open, revealing a tall, gaunt man with pale skin and gray bags under sunken eyes, dressed in what Bella could only describe as a dull orange sheet with a hole cut in the middle of it for his head—told you to shut the—

The man in orange jumped back into the other room when he saw Bella and her fellow officers, and Bella fired her electroray pistol at the same instant. A quick flick of the trigger sent a jagged bolt of blue-white energy bursting out to arc across the room—and fizzle harmlessly at the edge of the doorjamb.

Bella swore again, but louder this time.

The door slid closed and she charged, crossing the room in a few long strides in the light, artificially-enhanced gravity of the Saturnian moon of Telesto. She thumbed the door open and fired blindly into the room, then rolled in, came up on her knees, and fired again, holding the trigger down a little longer this time to keep the bolt energized, trailing across the space in front of her.

She heard the thump before she managed to turn and see the man in orange slumped against the wall, the back of his sheet-dress charred and still smoking a little from the electroray discharge.

Nice shooting, one of the other officers said as half a dozen of them pushed past each other to crowd into the room.

Thanks, Bella said, blinking, deciding on the spot that no one would ever need to know she was shooting blind and had hit the guy by dumb luck alone.

She stood and approached the stunned man, covering him with the electroray pistol in her right hand. There was a trapdoor in the ceiling above his head and he couldn’t help glancing up at it. His ratty little escape hatch—all he had to do was jump at least seven inches off the floor and the artificial gravity would let go. Then he’d be in Telesto’s natural microgravity state and up and through his little hidey-hole in no time.

Bella dug a cigarette out of a pouch on her belt and flicked the self-lighting tip with her left thumbnail, then slipped the filter end between her lips and took a good long drag.

The man in orange groaned and one of the other officers kicked the shiny, silver-plated Colt revolver the man had been going for away from his left hand. A second bent to pick it up and said, A slug thrower…on a vacc rock?

Dumbass, Bella grumbled around her cigarette. Who didn’t know that an Old School gun was a bad idea when a stray bullet could open a hole onto hard vacuum? Only a Martian…

A third constable held a blocky, black-cased BRAIN in front of him and scanned the stunned man’s face. The man on the floor groaned again and blinked his eyes open, struggling to keep them from rolling back in his head.

Tikhonravov, Bella guessed, and the cop with the scanner smiled and nodded.

So, the man on the floor—Ivan Tikhonravov, the Martian Cartel’s top man in the Saturn system—moaned, who wants to know?

Constable Bella Lucky of the Saturnian Federate Directorate for Investigation of Criminal Enterprises, Bella said. She holstered her electroray pistol and took the cigarette out of her mouth. She held the smoke in long enough to crouch next to Tikhonravov and blow it into his face. He coughed, Bella smiled, and she said, The DICE just rolled you.

* * *

Ná Degas sat in her cubicle in the Interconnected Amalgamates office complex on Mimas, well after work hours. Even in a room with six hundred cubicles, it was only Ná and the janitor robots—one of her division’s most popular models. She looked at her reflection in the clear panel on her desktop and ran the tip of a thin finger under one eye, sure she could see bags forming there. She’d done a lot just trying to get this internship at IA, the Saturnian Federate’s largest and most powerful corporation, and sleeping wasn’t one of them.

IA was, for all intents and purposes, in control of the Saturnian Parliament. The current prime minister, Kala Ladrao, was even a former IA CEO. A twenty-year-old student intern, Ná stood on the very bottom rung of a very tall corporate ladder. There was no lower pay grade. It was the robots, then her, then everybody else. Even her boss, James Dobro, couldn’t even be considered middle management—yet. But Ná had spotted him early and liked what she saw, and not just physically, though she wasn’t disappointed in his looks, either. Ná prided herself on being able to spot real talent, but more than that, real ambition. James Dobro would rise, and rise fast, and Ná would rise with him—until it was time to step over him.

Before I’m thirty… she whispered to herself.

But nobody moved up until the next guy up moved up—or moved on. And from all Ná had been able to find out, the guy above the guy above James Dobro wasn’t moving up any time soon—or soon enough, at least. So that meant he’d have to move on, and only a disaster would make that happen. A full-scale, can’t-sweep-it-under-the-rug, made-for-prime-time disaster.

The screen in front of her let out a bleep that seemed deafening in the all but silent chamber her coworkers called the bullpen. She took a deep breath and said, Answer, before it could bleep again.

Her own face came up in a window at the bottom right—her dusky skin too brown in the image and her thick lips a little too red. Her big brown eyes blinked back at her, framed by her square-cut bob.

The incoming call was blacked out, and Ná cringed, realizing she should have done the same. The only thing in the incoming window was the stylized crystal-white Z logo for Zhetson Ice Mining—a recently-acquired Interconnected Amalgamates subsidiary—and the word Tarvos.

A mechanical voice squeaked out, Subroutine Completed, and the connection was immediately severed.

Ná let out a puff of air and smiled. When she started to log off—it was time to go home, finally—her hands were shaking.

As her system shut down, Ná looked around again to make sure no one else had come in. It was three a.m. Saturn Standard Time. Even the janitor robots had finished and rumbled off to recharge for the next night.

Ná punched an eight-digit code into the front panel of a desk drawer and it clicked then slid open for her. She reached under a scattering of data crystals and empty cigarette packs and found a little bag of Martian Orange. She dug a pinch out with a fingernail and snorted it fast, throwing her head back and whispering, That’s the stuff.

She blinked exactly eight times then served up another pinch for the other nostril, repeating, That’s the stuff, and blinking exactly eight more times.

Ná sat at her desk for another few minutes, smiling, staring off into the dimly-lit, windowless office chamber, then she staggered to her feet and went home.

* * *

Bella Lucky lit another cigarette and stared dead-eyed across the table at Ivan Tikhonravov. His glassy eyes lingered on the cigarette, so Bella took it out of her mouth, held it between two fingers and looked at the tip as she slowly blew smoke rings around it. Tikhonravov swallowed.

Want one? Bella asked him.

Tikhonravov narrowed his eyes suspiciously but nodded just the same.

Bella shrugged and said, People in hell want snow cones. Then she put the cigarette back in her mouth and smiled, watching his face sink through surprise, past anger, and into a sort of dull submission.

Going somewhere? she asked.

The DICE evidence team had come in and cleaned the Martian Orange off the table, taken away the bowl and the bags. Tikhonravov sat where his naked punching bag used to sit, his hands cuffed behind his back. The rest of their little hovel—an old Telesto flop—was all but cleaned out. Furniture gone, a few empty boxes, and not another living soul.

Look, Ivan, Bella said, we can do this the easy way…

Tikhonravov sighed and let his head sag down so his forehead rested on the tabletop.

…or we can do it the really easy way, Bella finished.

You know if I talk they’ll kill me, Tikhonravov said, and Bella smiled at his Martian accent. She loved a good Martian accent—like everyone was grunting around too small a breath to get each sentence out, and every vowel sounded vaguely like an ‘a.’ You can sweat me down all you want. My answer will always be the same. The drugs were mine. All mine. I am solely responsible for their—

Her BRAIN interrupted him and he looked up at her, clearly irritated.

Bella lifted the Bio-Reassigned Artificial Intelligence Node from the tabletop—a slim, metallic blue rectangle that looked like a simple sheet of cut glass. But inside it were micro-thin slivers of human brain tissue, connected to the Saturnian grid and DICE’s own special network.

Excuse me, she said to the Martian drug dealer. It’s my mother calling.

She stood and thumbed the call through, but it wasn’t her mother.

Constable, the voice of the DICE dispatch system said—and only Bella could hear it, thanks to the implant, about the size of a grain of rice, under the skin just behind her right earlobe. Your interrogation has been monitored and the subject has been scanned.

Bella nodded, knowing the dispatch system would pick up on that. The interrogation had hardly begun, but in that time her BRAIN had scanned Tikhonravov’s brainwaves and the DICE memory miners had already started going to work on him.

Bella looked back at Tikhonravov and smiled. He twitched, blinked, and said, You can’t—

Still smiling, Bella held her BRAIN up for Tikhonravov to see, the text of the warrant scrolling across it, and said, Can too.

Damn it, Tikhonravov whispered, once again setting his forehead down on the tabletop. Damn you all.

What’s wrong, Ivan? Bella teased. I figured of the two you’d want to do it the really easy—

The Martian didn’t so much explode as burst, covering Bella in hot red gore and little bits of tissue. All that was left of Tikhonravov were his legs, up to about mid-thigh. They twitched a little and Bella sighed, blowing blood and—was that a tooth?—off her chin.

Well, she said, crap.

A few seconds too late, as usual, dispatch said through her BRAIN, Subject is a clone, danger of self-destruct.

Yeah, she said, wiping bits of the Martian clone’s brain off her BRAIN’s little screen. I got that.

Biohazard crew has been dispatched, the voice told her. Constable Bella Lucky, reassigned immediately.

Reassigned? she asked. Where? The dispatch system told her, and she asked, Why?

The dispatch system gave her the numerical code for homicide, and Bella whistled. She smiled and said, Understood. On my way.

Then the connection was cut and the rest of her team shuffled into the room, whistling, laughing, and retching more or less at the same time.

Ignoring them, Bella thumbed her BRAIN and said, Call Jimmy. She woke him up. I’ll be later getting back than I thought, she told him.

Really? he said, barely visible in their dark bedroom. What’s up?

Top secret, baby, you know that, she replied with a smile.

What’s that all over you? he asked.

Clone goop.

Again? He chuckled and said, Wish you were here.

Me too, baby. A couple days, maybe three. Max, she said.

Got it, Jimmy replied. Just don’t pull this crap on our wedding day.

"Especially not on our wedding night," she shot back with a wink.

Stay safe, he said—what he’d started to say instead of good-bye.

* * *

As long as Bella Lucky could remember, all she ever wanted to be was a cop. She grew up on cop games, cop vids, cop histories. In school when she had to write a report about a historical figure it was FBI agent Elliot Ness or Lunar Security Chief Bryson—her two favorites.

She smiled and sat back, admiring the new prowler they’d assigned her. It was a tight little ship, just big enough for four—two cops up front and two perps behind an invisisteel barrier—with a lockdown armory between the two front seats. The sleek lines conjured memories of the great old land yachts of the early twentieth century, down to the none-too-subtle fins that flared off the sides. The DICE shield gleamed in luminous paint from the side doors, a shield with the ringed planet and the motto To Apprehend & Detain in script along the bottom.

And it was fast—real fast. She wanted to see if it was as maneuverable as they claimed it was, but that would have to wait. There was a dead body on Tarvos getting colder by the minute.

It took the better part of the morning to cross the twelve-and-a-half million miles between Telesto and Tarvos, and at two-and-a-half million miles an hour the little asteroid-moon Tarvos went from a speck of light dimmer than the surrounding stars to filling her windshield in a few heart-pounding seconds as the prowler rapidly decelerated.

The console told her that the car had contacted Tarvos’s landing beacon and the two computers were already working her into an expedited approach. Still, Bella punched up a contact on the police frequency and asked for local law enforcement.

She was answered with static.

Don’t make me ask again, Tarvos, she warned.

Then she waited while her car made a sweeping turn to the right and ascended above the rim of the moon.

Tarvos was less than nine miles in diameter, an oblong, irregular red-brown rock framed by the Milky Way behind it. As her car ascended and the moon rolled gently under her, the first signs of civilization made themselves known. The first thing that caught Bella’s eye was a big sign in the shape of a jagged Z lit with a cold, blue-white light. Beneath it the landing lights were a darker blue, and the car lined itself up with them as it continued to slow and began a gentle descent into the open hangar bay. On either side of the unusually big hangar doors were two huge cranes, and a third underneath. They hung there still like the arms of a corpse, but the sight of them, covered in chipped yellow paint, their hydraulic muscles full of pent up—

One of them swung at her—fast.

The car lit up a proximity alert and nudged away—right into the path of a second crane. Bella sucked in a breath and grabbed the controls and squeezed to put the car into manual control. She stomped on a pedal and swung the wheel hard over so the back end of the car lifted up while it pulled left, seeming to balance in space on the tip of the left front bumper.

The crane scraped by only a few inches off the top of her windshield.

"What the hell?" she barked into the comm, still connected with Tarvos traffic control.

The third crane—or so she assumed—hit her car somewhere close to the back seat, on the bottom, and her jaw clacked painfully shut. She grunted and stomped both pedals and lifted up on the wheel. The car reacted fast—faster even than she hoped—and she lifted up and away from the bottom crane faster than it could chase her.

Bella looked to her right and saw the crane on that side coming in fast—and she was fading into it. The clawlike manipulator on the end of the crane jerked open as it lunged at her.

Why are you grabbing at me? she yelled to the crane as much to traffic control.

She spun the car away from the claw, but not quite far enough. The top of the claw scraped against the roof of the car, sending a teeth-shattering screech through the cockpit. Bella cringed at the sound of it and from the vibration that ran from her seat and the wheel through her whole body.

Then she swung the car around again and gasped when she realized she was inside the left crane’s claw and the fingers were coming down on her.

She hit the accelerator and the car leaped forward, the rear bumper clearing the massive claw by a hair’s breadth.

And she was crashing.

Kinda crashing, anyway.

Coming in hot! she yelled into the comm, as angry as she was scared.

The