Not With A Whimper: Producers, page 21
“Impressive.” He peered at her. “Why tell me?”
“Mr Richardson is in our debt—”
“For saving his life? Does that make the rest of us in your debt, too? I thought that rescuing survivors didn’t come at a cost to them.”
The captain looked amused. “No, for something else entirely. So, we’ve asked to buy out your contract with his company. He is, you understand, probably the most senior surviving officer of Amalgamated Lines, and thus can do the deal.”
Larry began to get a jumping sensation in his stomach.
“Why would you want to buy out my contract?”
“We can use a man like you – if you want the job. It would be in space, not on a planet, you understand? On Haida Gwaii. In the Ag sector – though you might at some future time try other pursuits.”
He felt his hands start to tremble. His dream come true. He opened his mouth to accept, then closed it again.
“I’ll have to ask Sandra. If she agrees, I’ll agree – but on one condition.”
“And that condition?” Captain Yrden looked very stern at the moment, but he couldn’t allow that to influence him. He had to make this stand.
“She gets a job there, too.”
The captain stood up, and he did, too. So, she would turn him down for that. Well, he and Sandra would find their way into space eventually – up from whatever colony world the Yrdens dumped them on.
The captain reached out her hand, and he, at a bit of a loss, took it. He figured that they could, at the very least, part on good terms. She had, after all, rescued him and his people.
“Welcome to Yrden Lines, Mr Clement. We’ll see about moving you and your wife up to the crew deck at once. We do have a spare cabin available.”
He goggled. It took a bit, but he recovered.
“We’ll do our very best for you,” he told them.
“We’ll expect it,” Captain Yrden replied.
While he stood there, not knowing what to say or do next, Jane Yrden opened a door, and Sandra came bouncing in.
“Did they tell you? Did you accept?”
He nodded yes to both. She ran up, and hugged him for all she was worth. “We made it,” she said. “We made it.”
“We made it.” It sounded good to him until he thought of how many hadn’t. Billions hadn’t. Bascombe and Chiptel? Probably gone – good and bad. Hartley, the friendly woman at Spaceport? Almost surely gone – Spaceport would be a natural target. His school friends and even Jason Wall, whom he had hated, but who became his best man? Dead or sent back to a near-stone age existence. Ernest Tucker, who had hired him? They would never see him again.
Yes, they had made it. And their parents? They might or might not survive. “Yes, we made it.” He didn’t think it worth a cheer.
TWENTY-ONE
Friday, September 3rd
Robert Clement gazed up at the starry sky. He had stood there for over an hour before Linda came to join him.
“They’re up there, somewhere, alive and safe,” she said, echoing his thoughts.
“And he understood – you heard him, didn’t you?”
“I heard him. He understood and forgave you. He said you were right.” She reached up and wiped the tears from his cheek.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“I can’t stand to listen any longer. Fred and Teresa are inside; they’re stronger than I am. It looks bad. You were right, there, too.”
He nodded, eyes still on the stars. “I wish I hadn’t been.” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll do what we can, for as long as we can. Who knows, we may even see them again.” He didn’t believe that for an instant.
Fred and Teresa came out to join them, saw them looking up at the stars.
“They made it,” Fred said.
“They’re alive and safe,” Teresa added.
“Thank God.” Linda bowed her head.
Fred nodded, then reconsidered. “Thanks go to Robert, too. Without him…” His voice faded, and he looked up with the others.
“We did our duty,” Robert replied. “We prepared them and sent them forth, ready to meet the challenges of life. The next generation lives on, will continue on.”
Linda, tears in her eyes, said quietly, “And that’s all we can ask, really, isn’t it?”
Author’s Note
(Or, the trouble that authors can make for themselves.)
Now, to do this story justice, we have to go back to “Pelgraff”. In “Pelgraff”, I made mention of several things that had happened before Armageddon on Earth – some 450 years prior to the events on Pelgraff. These details added depth to the story, and included mention of Jaswinder Saroya, who discovered the ‘J-Channel’ in hyperspace; sleep-learning; and soldier-fanatics, amongst others.
The Jaswinder Saroya character interested me, and I wrote a short story: “Courtesan”. But she kept bugging me, asking me to tell the rest of her story. I finally relented and added to the short story to make it a novel. Then, after writing and publishing “Courtesan”, I received several requests to do a sequel. I thought, why not? Thus came the idea for “Not With A Whimper”. I should know better. Thinking only gets me in trouble.
I started out in 2011, figuring I’d write a book that dealt with the other details from Pelgraff, which would take me up to the final Sol System war. As it dealt with Armageddon, I decided to call it, “Not With A Whimper”, as in, the world ended with a bang, not with a whimper. I figured it would grow to about 90,000 words (my longest previous novel just topped 100,000 words). It went very quickly, until I reached about 80,000 words (novel length in itself) – but I then realized that I was only about half-done, and I had so many different threads that I wasn’t doing any of them justice. It became just too much, so I let it lie fallow while I concentrated on other works.
But I kept coming back to it, wondering how I could make it work. Finally, I made the decision: I would take certain threads out of the uncompleted story, fill them out, and make them into their own novels. I figured about 4 books each one of about 60,000 words – short novels, shorter than Courtesan, which had 70,000 words.
The first one I dealt with, I called “Producers”. It encompassed a single thread. It ended up at 63,000 words, about what I had figured one. It came relatively easy and, thus encouraged, I went blithely on, not realizing what I had begun.
Each book after that became more difficult because they ran concurrently. Not only did I have to ensure that no character knew on, say, August 12th, things that happened in another book on August 14th, I had to deal with the fact that I had certain things happening on certain days and thus had to build up to them, use them in the other books. Not only that, when characters from the one book met characters from another book, they had to do that in the other book as well, though from an alternate viewpoint. It became a nightmare.
“Destroyers”, the second book I wrote, took two threads from the original unfinished book: that of the sleep-learning scientist, and that of the Germans soldiers. I had only minor difficulties integrating it with “Producers”. “Destroyers” ran up to 67,000 words.
Then the nightmare hit full force. I still had a lot of threads left. I pulled out two that seemed to fit together – one about saving the knowledge that those on Earth had accumulated, the other about saving the seeds of Earth plants. I called it, “Preservers”. But now I had to deal with the two previously published novels, as well as the fourth, unfinished one. And that started my real problems. I made the decision that I would have to wait until I finished the fourth novel before I published the third, because there existed just too many places where I could get in trouble – and I did. I began to loathe the mere idea of working on “Not With A Whimper”. Not because I didn’t like the story, but because the writing of it had become so terribly complicated.
“Preservers”, far from the 60-70,000 words I’d originally envisaged, ended up at 98,000 words. And I knew that the fourth, “Survivors”, would top that, because it took up all the remaining threads. Not only did it start before any of the others (on the time line), it finished after them, and had to tie up all the threads from the previous three, because they all meet at the end of the fourth. As well as that “Survivors” contained the major threads of the original – those of Jaswinder and Wen Carson. It ended up at a whopping 137,000 words, 30,000 words longer than any of my previous novels.
Altogether, the whole story (four books) of “Not With A Whimper” came to 365,000 words, or approximately 1100 pages in a print book. That was over 4 times what I had originally planned on for my little sequel. It took me 7 years of work and procrastination (mostly procrastination, because I just couldn’t figure out how to handle it) to get NWAW finished.
In the end, I have to say that it was worth it for me, personally. I like the stories; I’m glad they are out there – and completed. But, I also have to say: Never Again!
I hope you enjoy it. Please consider leaving a review.
D. A. Boulter.
Books by D.A. Boulter
D.A. Boulter’s Amazon Page where you can find all the following books:
Not With A Whimper Books:
Not With A Whimper: Producers
Not With A Whimper: Destroyers
Not With A Whimper: Preservers
Not With A Whimper: Survivors
Yrden Chronicles Books:
Trading For The Stars (Book 1)
Trading For A Dream (Book 2)
Other Amazon Books by D.A. Boulter
Courtesan
Pelgraff
Pilton's Moon / Vengeance Is Mine
ColdSleep
The Steadfasting
Prey
Enemy of Korgan
Ghost Fleet
In The Company of Cowards
A Throne At Stake
D.A. Boulter’s blog: http://daboulter.blogspot.ca/
D.A. Boulter can be contacted at: mailto:dougboulter@gmail.com
D.A. Boulter, Not With A Whimper: Producers
