Where The Action Is

The Corpus Christi slowed its enormous bulk to a groaning stop some 1,200 meters from the flank of the derelict ship. Displacing 435,000 metric tons, the Christi was a lot of ship to move in any given direction and when the main anti-matter drive engines idled down its magnetic field and the boat shuddered to a complete stop, Uri Haad sent out a couple of drones and waited for the images to resolve on his console. So far, the derelict had told him nothing. In his years of service Haad had come across some strange sights out in the Belt. Generally, after almost six hundred years of manned exploration, of the 17,000 systems explored and cataloged, only eleven harbored any kind of life at all. Out here most of the planets—the ones orbiting the double- and triple-sun systems in the direction of Orion—were gas giants with hard radiation-scorched moonlets. Back towards Alnitak, the triple star system that represented the end of the Belt, and the Flame Nebula beyond there were thousands of worlds that could have supported human existence, but none did. The small rocky planets were constantly buffeted by the harsh solar winds that scoured them clean of all life, stripped away their atmospheres and rendered them quite useless. Only one other planet in the Elber system played host to a rudimentary form of animal life and surely that life was not sophisticated enough to put together a ship capable of reaching star gap distances. This had to be something else, he thought, something from the Fringes, something very old, but, then again, something very new. Maybe something coming under human scrutiny for the first time.
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Excerpt from The Belt Loop.

False-color image taken from detail of "History Repeats Itself" © 1991 R. Jones

Things are indeed strange out in The Belt Loop where binary star systems are the norm and small yellow dwarfs lose millions of tons of mass to their bloated blue-giant companions. It is out here that the action of my next novel takes place, out here over 800 lightyears from mother Earth, out here where death comes at you before you know it.

Look for The Belt Loop in the Kindle store around Labor Day, 2011. Keep track of my progress here; all comments are welcomed.