Release date: April 15, 2018
Subgenre: Steampunk
About Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures:
Steam engines. Piracy. Adventure. Even More
Tea. Ramos and Simms are back!
Captain Marta Ramos, the most dangerous pirate
in the Duchy of Denver, is back and she and Simms are up to their goggles in
trouble. Has General del Toro found a way to use the Infected as an army and
can Captain Ramos work with her arch enemy, Colonel Geoffrey Douglas, to stop
him? Can Simms join forces with the devious Deliah Nimowitz on a jailbreak,
some sewer misadventures AND a high society soiree involving tea, a heist and
sausages? And what about the Rail King and his nefarious plans? Can Captain
Ramos and her crew stop him before he completes his latest dastardly deed, one that
may result in Deliah’s demise? Check out the next installment of the exciting
adventures of Captain Ramos and her valiant crew to find out more!
Excerpt:
Meriwether
Octavian Simms, known by his own preferences as “Simms” to friend and foe
alike, had never thought he’d live to see a day where he regretted his
inclination for boredom. The promise of an ordinary, middle-class life, in
which one had tea and read the paper and complained about one’s tiresome
profession—which no doubt had something to do with other sorts of papers,
though what one would do with them escaped his imagination at that point—over
the breakfast table had always seemed preferable to the sort of life that found
one dangling off a fifty foot drop from a rail bridge by one foot whilst being
shot at by angry men in uniforms, to pick an example completely at random from
his current lifestyle.
And yet, here
he was.
Life had been
solidly boring for three months and Simms was concerned. No, he’d moved past concerned in the first few weeks,
into worried, and was now headed
straight for anxious. It was the sort
of powerful emotion that had him tugging at his ginger muttonchops, which
hadn’t done his looks any good, and being unfairly snappy at his young daughter
Dolly. And he wasn’t the only one who felt as if things were definitely an
unaccustomed sort of wrong. Amelia, driver for their vast raiding engine
Diabola and former opera singer, had stopped singing. Gregory, the lookout, had
taken to leaving knotted bits of string everywhere, to the point that Cook had
started depositing them on his dinner plate every day. Lucius, a person of whom
no one was yet certain if he was human or a shaved gorilla, had gone through
all of the spare fabric in the Devil’s Roost for sewing projects and had
recently taken to stealing clothing out of the laundry to perform repairs or
upgrades that involved things like lace edging and embroidery.
While it was
relief that his anxiety took the form of something unexpectedly constructive,
it had also caused several minor emergencies in which no one could find their
trousers. Even the newest member of the crew, a mathematically gifted woman
named Little Wren, intended to replace the still-sorely-missed navigator
Elijah, had been cooling her heels for two months with nothing to do but start
teaching Dolly her native tongue, and Simms felt a deep suspicion toward his
daughter being given any power to call him names he couldn’t understand.
The problem
was simple to state and impossible to fix: something was wrong with Captain
Ramos. While in Simms’s opinion, something had been quite wrong with her in a
delightfully right sort of way ever since they first met in a fetid jail cell,
this was different. It was a wrongness that made of long silences with nothing
clever and terrible hiding beneath. It was a lifeless sort of wrongness that
seemed to have eaten the captain’s words out from inside of her and left a
hollow behind. And of course, she insisted that she was absolutely fine, in a
sort of perfunctory way that didn’t allow for argument.
Captain Ramos
had told Simms the barest details of what had come to pass in the Dead Plains
while she’d been away, but only after much prompting and stubborn insistence.
It was increasingly obvious that something more than what she told him had
happened up in the Black Hills, and she wasn’t going to talk about it no matter
how much Simms nattered at her.
So now he had
his own plan. It wasn’t a terribly complex one; in fact, it had only one step,
which had been “see if Miss Nimowitz has any ideas.”
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About Alex Acks:
Alex Acks is an award-winning writer, Book Riot contributor,
geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. Angry Robot Books has published their novels Hunger
Makes the Wolf (winner of the 2017
Kitschies Golden Tentacle award) and Blood Binds the Pack under the pen
name Alex Wells. A collection of their steampunk novellas, Murder on the
Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures, is available from Queen of
Swords Press. They’ve had short fiction in Tor.com,
Strange Horizons, Giganotosaurus, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed and more,
and are a regular contributor at Book Riot. They’ve also written several
episodes of Six to Start’s Superhero Workout game and races for their RaceLink
project. Alex lives in Denver (where they bicycle, drink tea, and twirl their
ever-so-dapper mustache) with their two furry little bastards.
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