The next story is called The Lion of God

and it will be serialized here at some point (probably when it’s done, it’s only 8700 words at this point.  But I posted a couple of snippets on Facebook yesterday and today so it’s only proper that I post them here, too, in case anyone is actually looking at this site.

So here we go.

Snippet #1:

“You talk about the time stream as if it’s alive,” objected Ariela.

Wolff chuckled. “Oh, that’s because we’re pretty sure it is,” he said. Von Barronov nodded agreement, and Wolff continued, “It’s not sentient, it doesn’t think – or at least, we don’t think it does. But it has certain properties that make us think of it as a living entity. If you poke it hard enough, well, poke it in a metaphysical sense, I suppose, it certainly reacts. It has a sense of self-preservation that is pretty well developed, again, so far as we can tell. And that’s what seems to kick in when we try to approach a significant nexus, like the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11, or the Long Beach nuke and the subsequent Transfenestration of Qom, and so forth.”

Transfenestration?” Ariela looked puzzled.

“The insurgents didn’t bother to open the windows, first.”

“Ah.”

Snippet #2:

“We’re going on a reconnaisance mission,” explained von Barronov. “Buford wants us to sneak up on one of those ships, board it, and see what’s what.”

“And he’s lending us five Marines to do most of the seeing and whating,” added Wolff.

“Armed Marines, one assumes.”

“Yep.”

Hunky armed Marines?”

“Honey, they eat crayons.”

“So?” asked Ariela. “I ate paste when I was a kid.”

Hang in there.  I’m slow.


Snippets from “The Lion of God” are copyright © 2019 by Nathan Brindle. All Rights Reserved. Don’t fuck with my copyright.

Edit, 5/5/2020:  I won’t be serializing The Lion of God as it’s turned into a 75,000 word novel, and will be on Amazon if I ever manage to finish it.

Snippet

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but:


[S]ome years after he did convince Sarah to marry me, a giant furball of an intertemporal war started, as a far-future band of renegades posing as a Time Patrol came back to steal my – his – oh hell, OUR time machine, because it had a significant feature theirs lacked – namely, his version was actually a hyperdrive, and theirs wasn’t.  Neither was their machine capable of traveling “sidetime” – it was strictly an uptime/downtime  device.

Which is why they came to our time looking for him, and smashed hell out of things in our time-line instead of his in the process.  Luckily, our daughter figured out how to slip between timelines, found him, and to make a long story short, he came with his time-line’s US Space Marines and several US Space Force dreadnoughts, kicked their asses back where they came from, and finally the whole crew went uptime to fuck them up so badly they’ll never be able to build a spacecraft again, let alone build another time machine.  I’ve seen the combat videos.  Make some popcorn, they’re riveting.


This is not the next story (“The Lion of God”), but is sort of related to it as you can probably already tell.