New Release: Outcaste – Christie Meierz

QSFer Christie Meierz has a new queer sci-fi book out (bi, MF), Tolari Space book 6: Outcaste.

Dr. Kimberly Storm-Gale has to make it back to Tau Ceti University — and fast — after his peaceful research sabbatical is turned upside down by corporate predators. As he struggles to find a way to remain a free man, he doesn’t expect his research subjects to kidnap him.

Grandchild of the Jorann or not, Halla is a burden to the outcastes of Sanctuary Aanesh, where she has struggled for years to survive the loss of her life-partner — a battle she is slowly losing.

Kim and Halla begin to dream about one another even before circumstances throw them together on Tolar, but now they have more to deal with than just their growing attraction: Kim may be the unwitting agent of a human government with designs on Halla’s world.

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Excerpt

Kim knew better. He told himself that firmly as a wave of punishing hammers pounded the inside of his skull. He knew better than to drink Kekrax wine. Therefore, the fact that he had done so was probably down to Two-Five and Four-Three releasing pheromones that interfered with his good judgment. That—oh damn. That had started with lifting his mood while they were still in the mud pool, hadn’t it? No, earlier than that. As soon as he encountered Two-Five and Four-Three on the street. They arrived waving their tails.

Manipulative little lizards.

They only wanted to help. Of that, he was certain. But Kekrax wine! Jesus. There was a reason Central Command banned it throughout human space. He might as well have been drinking straight absinthe, except that he didn’t feel drunk at the time. Not a good accompaniment to an evening spent conversing with an adult broodmale in his prime, which now—the entire interview was a fuzzy blur. If he’d hoped to salvage his situation with fresh information on broodmales, the opportunity had fled. Damn, what a waste.

Kim flung an arm over his face, blocking out the tormenting light on the other side of his eyelids, and became aware of warm, pleasant weights pressing him down, weights that wriggled in response to his movement. He lifted his throbbing head to peer one-eyed out from under his elbow, and met the drowsy blink of a broodling curled up on his chest. A First, he thought, though it was hard to tell with one so young. It—she—had two tails, though, so she definitely wasn’t the baby broodmale. They had only one.

Kim was fully awake now, unfortunately. He lowered his arm. He was flat on his back in a shallow bed of warm mud, head propped on a sandbag, with Four-Three and Two-Five’s current mob curled on top of and around him, most of them asleep. Well, that made sense. Kekrax weren’t cold-blooded, but humans were warmer than they were. The way all the babies were crowded about him suggested they appreciated his body heat.

Thanks to the wine, however, he remembered nothing at all of how the evening ended. The adults must have herded him into the nursery to sleep it off. Maybe he’d get another chance to interview the broodmale. He’d beg if he had to. He got his elbows underneath him, which provoked another round of sleepy wriggling and a series of dull plops as the broodlings on his chest slid off. He looked around, but still didn’t see the young broodmale. It would be smaller than the others, but piled on as they were, he would be hard to find. Kim started counting.

Hold on. Those weren’t mud brick walls.

This wasn’t his friends’ house in Kekrax Main’s capital city.

Kim sat up, fully awake. This was a spaceship. Now that he thought about it, the soft hum of a K-space drive sent a slight vibration through his sit bones. It was a spaceship in flight. Good lord. Two-Five and Four-Three had kidnapped him.

Aliens. God. Devote your life to learning about them, and you still never really knew what they would do next.

Author Bio

Retired Linux hacker and perennial language student, Christie Meierz began writing space opera while recovering from a life-threatening illness. Her debut novel, a science fiction romance set on a world of empaths at the edge of an advancing human empire, won the PRISM Award for Futuristic Romance in 2013. She has followed it up with four more novels set in Tolari space and several short stories. She is an active member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), earned a SCUBA ticket despite a morbid fear of drowning, and has been declared capable of learning Yup’ ik. Christie now lives in Rochester, NY, where she and her mathematician husband serve as full-time staff to two parlor panthers known to humans as Banichi the Assassin and Miss Myrtle the Hurricane Cat.