Release date: November 19, 2019
Subgenre: Space Opera
About Honourable Enemies:
Once, Colonel Brian Mayhew was the deputy commander of the Republican
Special Commando Forces. But now he's gone AWOL to take out crime lord
Rick Santerna, the man who murdered his family.
Mayhew's quest for vengeance brings him to the rim world of Maciste, where he runs into his former protégé Mikhail Grikov, now wanted as a traitor and deserter for eloping with enemy soldier Anjali Patel.
Mayhew knows that it's his duty to bring in Mikhail and Anjali. But with Santerna hot his tail, he finds that he needs their help.
Mikhail and Anjali know that Brian Mayhew is a threat to their freedom and their new life together. But now they are faced with a hard choice. Should they risk their lives to help a man who could condemn them both to death or should they let Mayhew die in the Great Arena of Maciste?
This is a short novel of 57000 words or approximately 200 print pages in the "In Love and War" series, but may be read as a standalone.
Mayhew's quest for vengeance brings him to the rim world of Maciste, where he runs into his former protégé Mikhail Grikov, now wanted as a traitor and deserter for eloping with enemy soldier Anjali Patel.
Mayhew knows that it's his duty to bring in Mikhail and Anjali. But with Santerna hot his tail, he finds that he needs their help.
Mikhail and Anjali know that Brian Mayhew is a threat to their freedom and their new life together. But now they are faced with a hard choice. Should they risk their lives to help a man who could condemn them both to death or should they let Mayhew die in the Great Arena of Maciste?
This is a short novel of 57000 words or approximately 200 print pages in the "In Love and War" series, but may be read as a standalone.
Excerpt:
On the independent rim world of Maciste, a man was running through the warren of grimy backstreets and dark alleys that made up the less savoury parts of the capital Cabiria.
He was no longer young, his reddish hair and neatly clipped beard liberally threaded with grey. His eyes were a watery blue and his body was stocky, packed with muscles rather than fat. The man was clad in the standard spacer’s garb of synth-leather jacket, shirt and utility pants. A blaster was strapped to his thigh — a high-grade model, Republican military issue — that clashed incongruously with the rest of his appearance.
In his regular life, he was Colonel Brian Mayhew, deputy commander of the Special Commando Forces, the elite military unit of the Republic of United Planets. But here on Maciste, he was just a spacer, captain of a tramp freighter, a man with a fake name and an equally fake identity.
He’d come to Maciste to take out Rick Santerna, one of the local crime lords, only to find that Santerna had sent assassins to take him out first. Lucky for Mayhew, the assassins had no idea whom they were really dealing with, and so he had been able to dispatch them, quickly and efficiently, if not exactly tidily. But there were more where those assassins had come from. And so Mayhew was on the run.
He darted into an alley to shake off his pursuers. It worked, too — well, almost. For one of Santerna’s goons — too clever for his own good — had followed Mayhew into the alley. The man should’ve just shot him in the back and be done with it. Quick, clean, efficient. Not exactly honourable, but who the fuck cared?
But the goon had other ideas. Either he had a sense of honour — unlikely, but stranger things had happened — or a grossly inflated sense of his own fighting skills. At any rate, he drew a knife, a nasty vibro-blade, and launched himself at Mayhew.
Bad idea.
Mayhew side-stepped the goon’s first lunge easily and drew his own blade, a standard Republican combat knife. He didn’t much care for edged weapons — blasters and shocksticks got the job done faster and more efficiently. But unfortunately, the rest of the galaxy did not agree and so Mayhew knew how to handle a knife just fine, even if it was not his preferred method of fighting.
The goon drew blood on his second lunge. Nothing serious, just a gash on Mayhew’s right arm. And Mayhew drew blood, too, a stab to the abdomen of his opponent. Nasty, but it wouldn’t kill the man. And if the thug gave up now, turned tail and ran, he could still have walked away from this. After all, killing a nameless goon wasn’t what Mayhew had come here for.
But of course the goon was stupid. Or maybe loyal or persistent or foolhardy. At any rate, he attacked again, weakened though he was from blood loss and the wound in his abdomen.
This time, Mayhew grabbed the man by his knife hand and slammed him back against the wall of the alley with a strength and speed belied by his appearance.
The goon wasn’t even half bad. At any rate, he managed to hold on to his knife, even though Mayhew repeatedly tried to wrest it from his grasp. Finally, he gave up and just let the goon take a stab or two at him, while Mayhew plunged his combat knife right into the man’s heart. The goon slid down the wall, quite dead, an expression of surprise frozen on his face.
“Idiot.” Mayhew spat out a mouthful of blood and sheathed his knife.
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About Cora Buhlert:
Cora Buhlert was
born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time
spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA
degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently
working towards her PhD.
Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres.
When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher. She also runs the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene and contributes to the Hugo-nominated fanzine Galactic Journey.
