It takes a certain type to crew a ship that drops you seven years at a time into the Deep. Kite-class cargo ships like Menkalinan get burned-out veterans, techs who’ve been warned off-planet, medics who weren’t much good on the ground. The Gliese-D run isn’t quite the end of the line, but it’s getting there. No cachet, no rewards, no future; their trading posts get Kites full of cargo that the crew never ask questions about, because if it’s headed for Gliese-D, it’s probably something nobody wanted. A year into the Deep, Amadis Reyes wakes up. Menkalinan is sounding the alarm; something’s wrong. The rest of the crew are dead. That’s not even what’s wrong.
Author
Genevieve Valentine has sold more than three dozen short stories; her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is the co-author of Geek Wisdom (out in Summer 2011 from Quirk Books). Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in May 2011. You can learn more about it at the Circus Tresualti website. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.
