“Wasn’t the Undergarden evacuated?” I asked. Aloud, since obviously Ship wanted to have this conversation this way, no matter how I felt about it. “It ought to be empty.”
“Exactly,” Seivarden replied. Ship
And…it’s now a month before you’ll be able to read the entire book! If you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter and already gotten Chapter 1, no worries. Keep your eye on Orbit’s website, where Chapter One will be going live sometime soonish in its entirety.
It’s got a star!
They like it! Click on that link and read the whole review!
As I told a friend in email, I am currently at the “BUT DID YOU LIIIIIIIIIIKE IT??????” stage of a book release. I know reviewers have gotten copies and some are reading it, and I know it’s unhealthy to keep refreshing twitter feeds and blogs in the hope that someone will say something, anything, about having read it. So I don’t. But.
The first few reviews coming out do help with that–as does the fact that they’re positive so far. By the time October 6 rolls around I’ll be as blase as I get about such things, and that’ll be good because that’s going to be a very busy week.
Almost here! Almost exactly one month away! I am so looking forward to everyone being able to read AM I can’t even say.
“The governor didn’t explain her request. Though Kalr Five noticed a commotion just outside the Undergarden last night. Security arrested someone, and they’ve been nervous since.” Briefly Ship showed me bits of what Five, still on the station, had seen and heard.
Seivarden wasn’t as indignant at it as Lieutenant Ekalu had been, but she was definitely wondering how I would respond.
That request, the barely polite gloss of at your convenience or not, was more peremptory than was strictly proper.
“Governor Giarod requests that you return to the station at your earliest convenience,” Seivarden said. Ship said.
But Seivarden had no need for such playacting. She would be doing this because Ship wanted it. Why would Ship want such a thing?
I was not amused or comforted by my soldiers’ attempts to imitate what I had once been. Still, I hadn’t forbidden it. Until very recently, my soldiers hadn’t known about my past. And they seemed to find in it a way to shield themselves from the inescapable intimacy of life on a small ship.
Generally not in front of me—I myself was an ancillary, the last remaining fragment of the troop carrier Justice of Toren, destroyed twenty years ago.
I knew that the common soldiers aboard sometimes acted for Ship, speaking for it, doing things Ship could no longer do, as though they were the ancillaries it had lost.