QSFer R.M. Olson has a new queer sci-fi horror book out (gay, bi), The Dark Between the Stars: The Water Paradox.
On a desert settlement on a remote planet, the limited water is as precious as life. Until it starts to kill them…
Thaddeus and the rest of the small medical crew have just arrived at their next assignment—a small, drought-ridden settlement, where people are dying in horrific, unnatural ways. They suspect the water source has something to do with it, but how do you live without water?
The crew soon realizes the deaths are only part of the problem. The people are hostile and suspicious, the settlement’s doctor is hiding information, and the crew can’t get off the planet until the annual storm blows through. They need to find what’s killing people, and quickly—but trapped in a hostile settlement on the harsh desert wasteland with water running low, even that might not be enough to keep them alive.
Set in the world of The Devil and the Dark, The Water Paradox is the second book in R.M. Olson’s gripping space-horror series, The Dark Between Stars.
Warnings: -alcohol consumption/intoxication -animal deaths (mentioned) -blood/gore -death (including death of a child) -misogyny/misogynistic slurs -PTSD/trauma -starvation/dehydration (including children) -suicide -violence (including gun violence)
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Excerpt
It was hot—absurdly, oppressively hot.
It was always hot this season, worse every year, it seemed, but today was particularly bad. The dirt on the pathways cracked into curled shards from the heat, the animals sprawled in a heat-stupor under the shelter of whatever shade they could find, the stringy plants that had been trying to grow along the sides of the waterlines, roots grasping at the moisture that leaked out between the joints in the pipes, wilting and crisping in the unyielding glare of the sun.
The hot breeze off the desert made the shade Lalli had set over the door twitch, but she knew better than to look to it for cooling. The settlement, at least, had the benefit of living things—people, animals, plants, even wilting and dying as they were—to cool the air a bit. Out in the desert beyond town, the sun baked the world into something hard and iron and unforgiving, and the breeze was the formed breath of it; the whispered threat of what happened to those who strayed too far, lost themselves in the endless expanse of sand and cacti and the sharp, brittle rocks that cut the land.
Besides, there was something about the breeze that came in off the desert—something wild and strange and unknowable. The desert was old, so very much older than their attempts at terraforming and settling and taming, a wild, deep, desolate place where everything you met was sharp and poisonous and deadly, and the beauty of it cut through you like a knife.
For all of her fifty-three years, Lalli had loved this place and feared it in equal measure. It called to her somehow. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes at night, the hot breeze seemed to be whispering something, words that rustled on the edge of her understanding. She could feel them shiver up her spine and perch, strange and unsettling, in the corners of her consciousness.
She loved the desert with a hopeless, destructive yearning.
It didn’t love her back. It was too old and untamed to love her back. And it would kill her if it could.
She shivered, even in the heat, the soft hiss of the sand pulled in off the desert scraping against the edges of the house with a sibilant whisper that set her nerves on edge.
It was just the heat getting to her. The heat and the unsettling stillness of the place in this oven of an afternoon when even the flies had ceased to buzz.
The scream broke the silence, splitting it like an overripe fruit—a shrill, gasping, horrified thing that went on and on and on before finally choking out.
Lalli recognized the voice.
She dropped her cleaning rag. “Elees?”
She was already halfway to the door before the rag hit the floor, panic moving her muscles like the heat hadn’t already seeped into them, sapping their strength. “Lees, what’s wrong?”
She was out the door and across her small, gravel-covered yard to the fence between their houses, pulling the gate back. “Lees!”
They had houses next door to one another, she and her daughter. She’d always wondered a little, secretly, how she’d deserved that. Elees had been a wild child, as wild as the desert that had raised her. She’d gone on the supplies runs on the off-planet ships as soon as she was old enough, and each time, Lalli had held her breath, a fear lighting in her chest that had never really gone away since the moment the child came, wet and wailing, into the world—that her daughter wouldn’t come back, this time, or maybe the next time, or maybe the time after that.
But she always had. The desert had always called her back, just like it had Lalli. And when Elees moved into the old house next to Lalli’s and started fixing it up, Lalli had waited, like she waited when watching one of the wild desert creatures, heart trembling in her chest, for her daughter to turn and run.
It still gave her a little thrill of wonder that Elees had stayed.
“Lees!” She could hear the crack of panic in her own voice as she slid through the gate and into her daughter’s yard.
She hadn’t put on shoes, and the hot gravel burned the soles of her feet through her thin slippers. “Lees, what’s wrong? Answer me!”
There was no answer. There’d been nothing since the scream.
She fumbled with the latch for a moment, the metal hot against her skin, and finally yanked the door open. “Lees!”
She almost expected to see her daughter coming down the stairs with that sauntering gait of hers, a wry smile on her face.
But the stairs were empty.
There was no one in the kitchen, no one in the small sitting room.
The breeze had picked up. The sound of sand against the walls of the house hummed in her brain, burrowed under her skin, a restless, frantic whine.
“Lees!”
Upstairs. She’d be upstairs, probably. Lalli took the stairs two at a time, her breath rasping in her chest, lungs already too tight from panic.
Elees’s door was cracked open.
Lalli stopped for a moment at the threshold, an unnamable dread gripping her.
“Lees?” she whispered.
Her voice skittered across the still air like the sand off the desert.
There was no answer.
Lalli closed her eyes.
Her chest ached, and her muscles felt like water from the running and the heat. Behind her, she was leaving a sticky trail of blood; the gravel outside must have cut through the soles of her slippers and into flesh as she ran across it.
She hesitated, her hand on the door trembling. Then, slowly, she pushed it open.
Author Bio
R.M. Olson writes science fiction featuring diverse casts, found families, and loads of action. R.M. has ridden the Trans Siberian railway, jumped off the highest bungee jump in the world, gone cage-diving with great white sharks, faced down a charging buffalo bull, and knows how to milk a goat. Currently they reside in Alberta, Canada with their four children, three cats, and a dog the size of a small bear. R.M. goes hiking and skiing more often than they probably have time for, eats more chocolate than is probably good for them, and reads more books than is probably prudent.
| Author Website | www.rmolson.com |
|---|---|
| Author Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/rmolsonauthor/ |
| Author Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/rolson_author/ |