QSF author Rebecca Cohen has a new sci fi book out:
Creating planets and guarding the stars leaves novice planet builder Kai Faewiva lonely. For members of Kai’s species who are born with an organ called a caerellon, their true love, their Sun or Moon, is identified at birth. But the novices are people who have lost their perfect love, and Kai’s Sun is long dead, killed in an accident when he was five years old. Or so everyone thought.
After recovering from another bout of the unidentified illness he has battled for years, Kai returns to work. But his quiet day at the planetarium is thrown into chaos when scans of Goka Prime, one of the planets in the Sol-Alpha2 system, picks up a life-form that shouldn’t be there. Kai’s Sun, Oliver Gyin, is alive and well, but how he got to be on Goka Prime, no one knows. Now he needs to be brought home.
Ollie has lived most of his life in the City of Harrea, never guessing he is from another planet. Surprised to find a stranger means the world to him, Ollie wrestles with his loyalties and the drive to return with Kai. To leave Goka Prime, he must give up everything and everyone he knows. But twenty years apart means Kai and Ollie face a fight to secure their destined future.
Excerpt
Kai puffed out his cheeks and stared up from where he sat on the floor at the feet of the team’s doctor, a jovial woman called Haja Nims. So far she’d put him through a barrage of physical exercises, which, while he was told were meant to prove his fitness, could easily have doubled as some sort of torture regime.
“So did I pass?”
She tapped the screen of the monitor mounted on the wall in front of her. “Of course you did. A young man like you should have no trouble.”
He wiped the sweat from his brow. “I feel like I’ve run for miles.”
“The exercises are designed to test physical extremes, and your blood work has come back with no issue, so I’m happy to clear you for duty.”
Kai had thought long and hard about whether he should bring up his illness. He argued with himself that Haja would’ve had full access to his records, so she should have read all about the illness that had plagued him and Dr. Shallal’s theories of what caused it, but she hadn’t mentioned it.
“What about my illness?”
Her eyes widened at his question. “What about it? I agree with Dr. Shallal’s theory, and we’re going to Goka Prime to retrieve your Sun, so I don’t see the problem.”
He picked himself off the floor and used the towel she handed him to wipe himself down. “I was worried it would be part of the assessment.”
“No, I’m more concerned with whether your insides would try to crawl out of your mouth.”
“That could happen?” he said with a mix of concern and disgust.
“In rare circumstances, but you don’t have the gene that expresses the phenotype for excess stomach secretions, so you’re good to go. You’ll be taking a course of supplements to help your body adjust, so there shouldn’t be any nasty surprises.”
Arma hadn’t explained the journey, likely assuming he already knew what was involved. But although he’d tried to read up on how they crossed the interspace, it made little sense to him. “Could you explain what will happen?”
If she was surprised by his question, she didn’t show it. “It can be a bit daunting, and Arma said you hadn’t asked directly.”
“I….”
“That wasn’t a criticism, Kai. Just that I was expecting you to ask.” She smiled kindly. “The process to visit the planets is kept deliberately vague. It’s not something we want everyone to know how to do with a little engineering knowledge and a big enough budget. But I can fill in most of the gaps you might have about the procedure.”
“I’ve more than gaps… more like great vast caverns.”
“I don’t understand it all,” admitted Haja. “But I know enough to explain so you know what’s going on. There aren’t many people who really understand the true intricacies of the process. But the team will board the rover, which will already be loaded with everything we need for the expedition. The antigravity field will activate, and once we stabilize the vortex, we’ll initiate creating, for want of a better word, a wormhole that will allow interspacial travel between here and the planets.”
“And it won’t hurt? I mean, we’ll be shrinking size….” Just thinking about the concepts had made Kai’s brain hurt, and he couldn’t get over the fact they were magnitudes of scale larger than the people of the planets they created. Hell, some of the planets would sit in the palm of his hand.
Haja shook her head. “No. I know it is a difficult concept, but you remain the same size proportionally to whichever part of space you inhabit. Otherwise you’d be too big to get on Goka Prime or be microscopic on Miridena. The interspace-corzonal-probability constant is used to calculate the correlation.”
Kai considered himself fairly intelligent, but the advanced physics needed to understand the working of the journey were too much for him. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
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Author Bio
Rebecca Cohen is a Brit abroad. Having swapped the Thames for the Rhine, she has left London behind and now lives with her husband and young son in Basel, Switzerland. She can often be found with a pen in one hand and a cup of Darjeeling in the other.
Blog: http://rebeccacohenwrites.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/R_Cohen_writes
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/rebecca.cohen.710
DSP author page: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/index.php?cPath=55_462
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Rebecca-Cohen/e/B007UEFIXS/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1