Release date: February 17, 2017
Subgenre: Dystopian fiction
About Sieging Manganela:
When you’re waging war against the people who sold your ancestors
those multigenerational bioengineered supersoldier enhancements,
you can pretty much predict they’re not going to meet you
face-to-face, especially if they happen to have an endless supply
of remote controlled drones.
The city of Manganela has been sending drones after the army camped
outside for the past several years, and now it looks like the war
might be ending soon, and Corporal Turo Berengar might even get to
meet that city girl he’s been surreptitiously texting. Assuming he
can survive the drones.
Excerpt:
The siege had been going on for seven years.
Manganela was not quite an aircity, but it was similar to one
because it was enclosed, and self-sufficient. A cluster of shiny
white towers and bubbles, eight thousand meters square, one
thousand meters tall at its tallest point, extending a good
distance into the ground below. Capacity for half a million people,
supplying them with food and solar power, filtering the torrential
winter rains and adjacent seawater for them to drink, and
converting their trash and sewage into useful products, like
drones.
They had no soldiers, in fact. Anyone on the enemy side who might
be considered a soldier was fighting over the mineral deposits in
the Canyon Belt, far to the east. In Manganela they just sent
various kinds of drones out through a doorway that was guarded by
chemicals and bacteria. The soldiers outside had given up trying to
get inside after the first several months of siege, which had
culminated in a gruesome measles epidemic, and ever since, the
standing order had been to kill anyone trying to get in, or out,
while leaving the city itself alone.
Turo hadn’t been here long. Only a couple of months.
“… intrusive memories?” Quicksilver was looking at him expectantly.
“No, can’t say that I have.” Turo turned around and folded
his arms.
“You’ve got a history that indicates potential for behavioral
disturbance. And you did jump in front of a drone.”
Turo’s anger rose. Quicksilver saw it and flickered his eyes toward
a nearby alarm button, and Turo froze and took a deep breath,
reflecting that whatever tools the medic had used to put him back
together could probably disassemble him rapidly. “Don’t be a nox.
If I get kicked out on a crybaby discharge, I lose my pension and
my mother gets kicked out of her hospice.”
“There’s no one else?” Quicksilver’s face was very sincere,
but Turo still didn’t entirely trust him.
“Just mom is left. She’s in one of those homes where old ladies
live. Needs attendants. Blind.”
“What does she get if you die an honorable combat death?”
“Full pension,” he answered right away. Then he wondered if he
should have pretended he didn’t know that.
“You almost died in your last assignment.”
“Rage plague. I guess you know all about it, being a
doctor.” It came on like the flu, then the symptoms
went away, and the next thing you knew, you were spontaneously
bursting into a fit of violent rage. Most sufferers would try to
kill anybody near them, passing the infection along to anybody that
got close enough to sustain a wound. Some would get self
destructive instead. If they still had enough presence of mind to
figure out how to operate weapons, things could get very ugly.
They’d rage and rage, without eating or sleeping, until they
dropped dead. It usually took a few days.
“I know about it.” Quicksilver grimaced.
“My whole unit caught it.” Turo returned the grimace. “I was
the only survivor. Got promoted to corporal and sent here.”
“They’re going to release the cure.” Quicksilver suddenly said
after a long pause. “Some of their scientists got caught, and they
wanted to avoid the war crimes tribunal so they gave up the recipe.
This is recent, couple days ago. Decisive victory will happen soon,
and you heard it from me first.”
Amazon
About Charon Dunn:
Charon Dunn originated in Maui, lives in San Francisco, and is
leaping into self-published science fiction authorhood with a
series of YA adventure novels set in a far-future,
asteroid-reconfigured earth. She does nerd stuff for trial lawyers
in the daytime, and she loves tandoori chicken, video games and her
thirty pound cat, not necessarily in that order.
Sieging Manganela is a standalone side novel that accompanies the Adventures of Sonny
Knight trilogy. Volume one, One Sunny Night, is available on Amazon, and volume two, Retrograde Horizon, will be out later this year.
Wonderful!
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