Showing results by author "Christina Engela" in All Categories

Enjoy a humorous look at life in space through the eyes of some colorful characters in this collection of five unique sci-fi tales by Christina Engela, spanning everything from adventure to suspense to comedy, and then back again!

The last thing Captain Stuart Flane expected while working to solve the enigma of the Kilgary was a day-long running battle with the undead! Their troubles didn’t end there though, because the Mercury, their only ride home, was also in trouble!

The ISS Mordrake is in serious trouble. After a skirmish with a Corsair marauder, she is stranded in deep space, far from regular shipping routes, and death appears certain. But in space, not all things are certain. Not even death. Adrift and stranded in deep space with no hope of rescue, the ISS Mordrake has six month’s worth of food left, but just less than two weeks of air, and things are looking pretty grim.

Mykl d’Angelo, skipper and owner of the loderunner Pegasus, had fallen on hard times, and he'd just had the worst day of his life in that field. Due a minor misunderstanding, his crew had stolen the "Short Shit" - the ship's only shuttle, leaving him and two others behind to crew the ailing (and now understaffed) loderunner on their own.

Deanna, a small backwater Terran colony generally known as an idyllic tourist-magnet (if watching birds blow up if they flew too high were your kind of thing) had just hit a speed-bump on the highway of Life called the Deannan Un-civil War.

It was 1939, and a close-knit South African family found themselves in need of a new home. Peter van der Westhuizen, a husband and father of seven who spent most of his days on the road as a truck driver, did his best to provide for them. Then he found Opsaal. It’s an Afrikaans word that means "saddle up", but it was also a place: a farm, to be exact - a lonesome speck of nothing on the edge of a dirt track nowhere near a main road in the South African wilderness, somewhere in the Adelaide district.

Returning from an evening in Mars City spent visiting relatives he didn’t know he had, Timaset Skooch arrived at the local space port to find his new acquisition stolen. A few minutes later, the crew of his slightly run-down loderunner "Celeste", returned from a nearby pub, blind drunk, puzzled, and now unemployed as well. Ever since he’d decided to quit being a PI and to try his hand at running cargo instead, things had just blown up in Skooch’s face one day at a time (Florpavian Flamebirds tended to do that occasionally).

Deanna was just another third-rate colony in the Terran Empire - and it was pretty much as boring a lump of rock as could be expected. That is, until Gary Beck, a.k.a. Beck the Badfeller, ran over an obsidian crow with his jeep on the highway to San Fedora and didn’t have a spare tire. Things pretty much went down hill from there.

After nearly two days of fierce fighting, the Battle of Turtle Island left the skies of the Corsair world darkened with their dead. For a while, the terror seemed to be over, but not just yet. Not all the great Corsair figures of legend had been killed or captured - a few had slipped through the net. Dead Beckoning is the tale of Adam, a former Corsair captain working to expunge his bloody past by doing good - starting with helping the imperial starship Antares to track down and capture one of the most powerful and feared Corsairs in legend: Sona Kilroy.

After that disappointing and sudden end to what had been a promising career, Mei rewarded herself with a long, relaxing vacation in the outback to celebrate her gender reassignment and her new start in life. The first stop on her journey turned out to be a little backwater planet called Deanna....

The Deannan Uncivil war was in full swing, and the fascists appeared to hold all the aces. All that stood in their way was the Loyalist Militia: a lot of angry locals who wanted their abducted friends and relatives back, didn't like to be told how to live their lives, and most importantly—could handle a blaster a little.

Deanna - the spotted cow of the galaxy, was in trouble. This was all beyond having a funny moon that fell down occasionally, or having jet-propelled birds that exploded if they flew too high; this was serious. An army of fascists had seized power and started rebuilding Deanna as a eugenic utopia—without all the messy inconvenience caused by diversity and dissent.

Stuart Flane, Captain of the starship Mercury, and lately the butt-end of innumerable jokes doing the rounds at Space Fleet H.Q., is called upon once more—kicking and screaming—to investigate all manner of preternatural fuckery.

Charting the frontier of unknown space was a guaranteed humdrum, routine mission—which in the case of the starship Mercury, may or may not have been a subtle way to punish Captain Stuart Flane for recently losing 90 percent of his crew without a satisfactory explanation. It was hard to tell sometimes, when it came to discerning Admiral Tawney's motives. The Old Man was like that—but at least he seemed to have a sense of humor.

Troubled times had come to the small Terran Colony planet of Deanna–and having amusing names for its sun (Ramalama) and two moons (Ding and Dong) hadn't made this quaint little world immune to bad things…. After the shock assassination of a visiting member of the imperial family, and with the three largest cities on Deanna overrun by fascist troops, the local government goes into hiding.

Sheriff Peggy-Ann Muller suddenly found herself hip-deep in strange events - even stranger than usual...and skinheads, too - did she mention the skinheads? Something had stirred in the darkness on the remote, usually idyllic Terran colony of Deanna - something Nazi...and it only seemed to be getting worse! Nobody could say when it started or how, but something had changed. Without being noticed, hate had come to Deanna and made a nest there...and a terrible plot was about to hatch! The quirky residents of the third-rate colony faced a challenge unlike any they had seen before.

Alcoholism is a creeping, crippling tragedy that affects the lives of millions. It's irrevocably affected the life of Louis van Pletten. At 45 years old, he is still struggling to complete his third book, his great masterpiece, his magnum opus. Trouble is, at over 300 pages, it's morbid, dark as hell, and as full of utter misery and self-loathing as he is. He can barely stand to read it himself. He should burn it, but it's taken him three years to write the damn thing. And he has no spark left to start over - and just enough money left to last him three more months.

You may be wealthy, you may be influential, even popular... but just because you're successful at life doesn't mean you're necessarily successful at everything. Those things don't protect you from everything fate might have in store for you. This is exactly the case for Harald and Virian Vanderbilt - an entrepreneurial couple, happily married, who run their deep-space prospecting company together, building a small business empire. Then one day they're unexpectedly separated when the ship Virian is on board is lost during a prospecting voyage.

“Sci-fi is the main thing,” I was told. “Compelling would be nice. Strange is only a suggestion.” That set the wheels turning – and why not – since I’ve been a sci-fi fan my entire life! So I set out to look for stories that met these parameters - sci-fi that celebrates the weird, embraces the unusual, seeks to unscrew the inscrutable...and is... strangely compelling! If that's what you're after, you’ve come to the right place!

What is it that lurks in the darkness? In the closet, under the bed...or in the dark, abandoned basement of a busy city hospital? The terror is everywhere. It follows us wherever we go - even into the dark, terrifyingly empty depths of space. Watching...waiting...lurking on the edge of sight.... What is it that we fear about the darkness? Stick around - you’re about to find out. Malice! is a collection of horror tales by Christina Engela.