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Stories from the Verse
In Version
Chapter 41: Kondor 231
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 254
Kondor raced back to the house. Bursting in, he started calling Zeke, who casually came from the kitchen with a piece of fruit partially eaten.
“‘T’sup?” he said.
“The aliens are going to attack; we’ve got less than five hours to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Five hours seems a lot of time to me.”
O.K., maybe he was overreacting. Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that he was ambushed by an enemy he had not anticipated; but Zeke was there, too, and he wasn’t overreacting.
“Maybe. But we need to coordinate with the others. If they’re expecting us to do one thing, and we’re expecting them to do another, we might be working against each other. Go get Slade and Shella; I’ll go get Vashti. We should meet in the spaceship, so Derek can continue monitoring everything.”
Not waiting for an acknowledgement, he headed toward Derek and Vashti’s house. Why didn’t he go get Slade? Vashti still made him a bit uncomfortable--she looked so like Leah, it always reminded him. But then, he thought Zeke would be uncomfortable awakening another man’s wife, and Kondor was both a widower and a doctor, so scantily clad females were familiar territory for him--even if they did remind him of his wife.
Anyway, he didn’t have to enter the bedroom; he didn’t have to enter the house. He knocked on the door, and waited, then knocked again.
The door opened, and she smiled up at him. “Yes, Joe?”
“We--we need to have a meeting. The aliens are going to attack, and we have to know what we’re going to do. We’re headed over to the hangar, so we can be by the radio while we talk.”
She nodded. “I’ll be right out.”
The door closed, but it was barely a minute before it opened again and Vashti appeared.
“You didn’t have to wait, you know. I’ve been to the hangar.”
“Oh--well, it seemed the polite thing to do, ma’am.”
She laughed at the courtesy title, and they headed to the hangar together.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #482: Versers Engage. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
