Title: Bad Neighbours
Author: PM Griffin
Purchasing link: http://amzn.to/1qWNjXR
Book Blurb:
Stellar Patrol Colonel Ciarnan Lacy and his allies, the President of the planet Aden and the head of her Naval forces, struggle to prevent a take-over by their grossly overpopulated near neighbor, the planet Sappho of Clodia. While trying to thwart this threat from the stars, they must also protect local civilians and livestock from ferocious predator packs and a gigantic hunter from the deep ocean and defeat an attack against their own lives by a deadly assassin. The Sapphonan peril escalates to the point that even more than the survival of Adenites as a distinct people is at hazard. The prospect of genocide has become a very real possibility. Lacy realizes that only by risking and probably sacrificing his own honor and perhaps his freedom can he hope to shield the people who have become his responsibility from the disaster looming over them.
Excerpt:
The attackers seemed to
be everywhere. Almost everywhere. A large area surrounding the pole to which a
lone man clung about thirty feet from the ground was clear of living beasts.
Only piles of dead remained within that space to testify to the effect of his
weapon during the first moments of the assault.
Lacy shuddered. Even
the dragon he had encountered years ago on Fairie had not filled him with the
raw fear he felt at this moment.
The damn things were
swarming around the embattled lead defenders. Two boars were down already…
“Flame them!” Shea
snarled as she sent a bolt through the head of a hound leaping for the back of
the biggest tusker, the king boar. “We’ll never be able to burn them all down
in time.”
She was right, the
Noreenan realized. The attackers recognized their danger and dispersed while
the flier was near but quickly resumed their assault once it sped by, as it had
to do. The perimeter was too large for them to cover if they remained in one
spot…
He straightened
suddenly. “Give me your blaster. Bring us in as close as you can to the
defenders and drop altitude a couple of feet.”
The woman obeyed
without question. Lacy set the weapon she handed him to broad beam and
transferred it to his left hand. He was not ambidextrous, but he did not need
to use it with a sharpshooter’s skill to accomplish what he intended to do.
He sent a long bolt
blasting into the ground on a broad front rather than directly into the animals
themselves. A number were felled all the same, and the rest sprang back. Within
seconds, a fiery half-circle stood between the threatened herd and the bulk of
the huge pack.
Maureen smiled coldly.
The hounds were temporarily foiled. They could not cross the burning vegetation
and searingly hot soil to resume their attack.
The tuskers were not
free of danger. Ciarnan gave his attention to the assailants that remained
within the barrier. Those were completely engrossed in their battle and
appeared to be unaware of what was happening behind them. Most probably, that
had never before been an issue when one of their packs joined combat with
intended victims whether they met with success or were beaten off in the end.
There were a lot of
them, maybe too many, the man thought grimly. The humans had not dared to fire
the ground any nearer to the herd for fear of injuring the tuskers. There was
still a hard fight ahead, but there was a chance. He now had a hope of
lessening the odds against the defenders.
He concentrated on
picking off the hounds pressing the tuskers most closely, literally blasting
several off the backs of the embattled boars.
“It’s starting to
cool!” the admiral warned sharply.
The Patrolman nodded
and started to raise his left hand to reset the barrier.
Movement! Lacy snapped
off a shot and dropped the hound hurtling, not at him, but at Shea. He felled a
second coming in at almost the same moment from a slightly different angle. His
mouth hardened into a grim line. Maureen had said the beasts were smart. She
was correct. They were. The things were trying to take out the unarmed driver…
Another bolt seared
through the air behind him. A yowl and a thud answered it.
The Noreenan
instinctively glanced back in time to see an injured hound squirm to its feet.
It had been a long shot, but the man on the pole had saved him a probably fatal
tearing.
It required only
moments to refire the boundary, but that was time enough for conditions to
deteriorate again on the battle line. The boars were tired, their reactions
slowing. As Lacy raised his right-hand blaster to resume his part in the fray,
a hound sprang at the centermost tusker’s head. He tossed it off, but only
blood-stained bone remained of the left side of his face.
The bloodied attacker
scarcely struck the ground before leaping again at its victim. Ciarnan dropped it
and sent bolt after bolt into the others who had hastened to swarm around the
severely wounded animal.
He succeeded in easing
the pressure on the king boar, but his concentration on that single duel had
left the other assailants free to pursue their own battles.
There was no end of
them even without reinforcements from beyond the barrier to augment their
numbers. He and the boars could not kill enough of them to blunt the
effectiveness of their attack.
Shea felt the same
desperation. Her free hand touched the transceiver controls. “Kara, where in
all the Federation’s hells are you?” If those soldiers did not come, and come
soon, there would be no animals left to save. Maybe no flier crew, either.
Their own position was anything but secure.
She gasped as the
vehicle rocked violently. Two of the hounds had struck it in a powerful leap,
coming up under it out of Ciarnan’s sight and range.
The craft rose abruptly
to enable him to take them out but then descended once more. They had to remain
on this level if they were to provide any effective aid to the tuskers.
Author Bio:
Pauline (P. M.) Griffin has been writing
since her early childhood. She enjoys
telling a good tale, and since she always works with characters and situations
deeply interesting to her, she finds the research as rewarding as the
scribbling/keying.
Griffin’s Irish love of story telling coupled
with her passion for history, the natural world, and the above-mentioned
research have resulted in twenty-four novels and fourteen short stories, two
Muse Medallion Award winners among them, all in the challenging realms of
science fiction and fantasy.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her
cats Nickolette and Jinx and three tropical fish aquariums.
