Maelstrom - of Hunters and Hunted: Maelstrom, #787

By Daniel L. Raven

The world has become a hard and dangerous to live in place since the catastrophic event now known as The Great Dry. Centuries have past since that disastrous time and the climate has changed to a hot and scorching heat. Scouring storms roam the planet, treacherous sands suck down all they can in dangerous currents and huge twirling maelstroms. Water and food is hard to come by.

Of the billions of people only a handful have survived the world-altering cataclysm, but those who did have adapted. The struggle for life continues and people make a living any which way they can. Hunting for water, hunting for food...

 

Northeast of Galdrex lie Chimaera Fields. There are a few of these fields spread throughout the world, but these are the largest, and also, luckily, the closest for the crew of the Pequode.

 

A whaler, a man with many such voyages under his belt, takes his ship and crew out to these Chimaera Fields, hoping to catch one of the chimaeras.
It's a dangerous job to hunt for animals as large or even larger then the ship they hunt them with. But the crew has an unspoken determination among them, being confident in their ability to catch one. They have done so before, and lived to tell.
But chimaeras can be fierce animals when threatened. In the end, one can never be sure, and a lot can happen.

So who will be the hunter and who the hunted?

 

(novelette - 11.400+ words)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel L. Raven
• Release date: Oct 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798224867516

Book preview

MÆLSTRØM

of Hunters and Hunted

787 aGD.

By: Daniel L. Raven

Dedication

***

In my quest to get all the stories that whirl around in my head to paper, the Maelstrom stories are more or less the first one to be scribbled down. So these adventures in this world are dedicated to the art of writing, I guess. I hope you have as much pleasure in absorbing them, as I did in writing them.

Happy reading!

Copyright

***

Copyright © 2023 | Daniel L. Raven

Cover design & copyright © 2023 | Daniel L. Raven

4th edition | expanded edition

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Chapters

***

Dedication

Copyright

Chapters

Preface

Map

Intro

Chapter 1 - Hook ...

Chapter 2 - Preying upon

Chapter 3 - ... line ...

Chapter 4 - Preyed upon

Chapter 5 - ... and sinker

Chapter 6 - Stories to tell

From this Author

About the Author

Note

***

The MælstrøM series is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth.

A major cosmic catastrophe has befallen the solar system. Comets, large enough to be planet killers, coming from the dark and depths of space, graced the planet, damaged the atmosphere and caused major tectonic shifts, earth quakes and tidal waves. And all-out chaos.

Billions of people died in that disaster. Most of the planet's water got vented into space through the damaged atmosphere, pulled out by the gravity of the comets, and vaporized in the cold and vast darkness. After the comets grazed the planet, they struck the sun, where most of them burned up or exploded. The force of the blasts made a big gas bubble ‘brake off'. It started orbiting like a little sun of its own around its big sister. Because of the heat, the last vestiges of open water on the planet vaporized and disappeared.

More people did in the aftermath of the disaster, from radiation, from heat, from thirst.

A small group managed to survive by hiding underground in large caves. There they spend decades in fear and anguish, waiting for their end. But against all odds they survived. Then, when the radiation lessened, they decided to get out, go up and into what was left of their world.

The surface of the planet was left bone dry and where once oceans ruled, now a fast desert landscape awaited all that gazed upon it. The world had become a hot and scorching place, where the few human survivors now had to scramble day in and day out for food and even more for the little water they managed to gather.

The magnetic fields of both planet and sun had gone haywire and the oceans of sand were moving and shifting and streaming just like once the oceans of