Bonus Queen & Commander Short Story

While I’ve been waiting on the first round of Queen & Commander edits, I’ve almost finished the super-detailed plotting for the sequel. The sequel currently has a million working titles and, my favorite part, a new character — the robot Texas ranger.

Today’s post is not about the sequel nor about how the production of Q&C is working out. Nope, it’s about the bonus short story which I’m going to package with the novel. Errr, really it’s “Hey! You get a bonus short story with every copy of Queen & Commander!” It is NOT a stand alone story and makes very little sense unless you’re already familiar with the novel’s worldbuilding. But, heck, let’s just post the first little bit anyway, yeah? It’s destined to change… a lot. But I thought you might get a kick out of this.

Excerpt:

“So Much To Offer”(or “5 Times Alan Didn’t Devote, And 1 He Did”)

I. The Parent

When Alan told his Mum that he really, truly, for certain planned on doing his university work in physics, she smiled and told him to be well-rounded. By which she meant: take biology courses.

A year later, he explained that he’d already received his bachelor’s degree and had begun work on his Master of Mathematics. This didn’t stop Mum from suggesting that bioinformatics was a very computational field and that she could use a strong interdisciplinary researcher to balance her new linguist.

At this point, Alan realized she meant for him to join her Hive when he finished his degrees. Now, he loved his Mum. He did. And he appreciated all her fine Devoted who had taught him to respect science.

But he had no intention of tying himself to Mum forever. That just… ugh, no. He didn’t want to always be thought of as Mum’s baby. Oh, he could visit for a week or two at hols, but he planned to make his own choices, thank you.

I’m terribly sorry, Mum, but you seem to be trying to take over my life.

Alan stopped sitting in on cognition and computational biology lectures. He told his advisor that he’d switched his M.Phil. thesis to be something utterly theoretical, like differential geometry. The stuff they used for tensor jets.

He’d rather choose some old battleaxe Queen than get stuck behind his mother for the rest of his life.