QSFer Elizabeth Hale has a new FF sci-fi romance out: Every Almost.
What happens when a stranded engineer from 1990 gets six months of free passage on a starship full of rescued space animals?
Charlie Wickett has a knack for fixing anything you put in front of her. She’s got the job she’s wanted since she was nine years old, her sister sharing her apartment, and a life in California she built herself, out of nothing, on purpose. It’s a good life.
Captain Reyna Solas of the Emberkind CV-0417 is just trying to get through her day, thank you very much. Between an unconventional animal rescue, an angry ship chef, and an Admiral who won’t take no for an answer, the last thing Reyna needs is an alien from a non-contact planet crash-landing in her ship’s kitchen.
When Charlie accidentally touches a piece of space debris that, technically, shouldn’t exist, she wakes up forty light-years from home on an alien animal rescue vessel, looking up at a captain who somehow makes everything a little less terrifying.
Now Charlie has six months aboard the Emberkind as it carries her home. Six months of impossible rescues, alien corridors, and the best engineering problems she’s ever been handed. Six months to learn the people who run this ship, who are strange and loud and kind and, somehow, her kind of people.
The Captain is a different problem entirely.
But Charlie will return to Earth… just so long as nobody does anything drastic.
Like find a reason to stay.
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Excerpt
“Hey, Kit. It’s me.”
She leaned back in her chair, the phone receiver tucked against her shoulder, and let her eyes close.
“I know you’re busy with Mr. Henderson. I just… I wanted to say something while it’s fresh in my mind. While I don’t have you around to interrupt me.” Charlie laughed quietly.
“You were right. On the phone just now. You were completely right, and I’m sorry. I know you said not to be sorry, but I am. I know you’re handling things. I’ve known you can handle things. Hell, probably better than me. I just… I think I keep calling because if I’m managing the details, I don’t have to think about the fact that Mom’s gone.” A deep breath. “And if I’m worrying about you, I don’t have to sit with how much I miss you, Kit-Kat. But that’s my thing, not yours, and that’s not fair to you.” She took a big breath. “That’s why I’m sorry.”
She dragged a hand down her face.
“Here’s what I should have said on the phone, and what I should have been saying all along, and all these years since I noticed you growing up and becoming an adult and living life as this incredible person.” Charlie took a deep, cleansing breath. “You are the strongest, smartest person I know. You have been since you were seven years old and you sat next to me on the back porch with popsicles and didn’t ask a single question about why I was upset. You moved to California with nothing just to stick by me when Ed and Diane kicked me out. You walked away from them without looking back. You got into UCLA all on your own, following your own dreams, and then you got into the graduate program. Now, you’re handling Mom’s entire estate by yourself, and you’re doing it better than I ever could.”
Her voice softened.
“I trust you, Kit. I trust you implicitly. I trust the woman you’ve become. And I am so, so proud of you. I should say that more. I should say it every time I call instead of asking about lawyers and insurance paperwork.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
“I love you, Kit-Kat. More than the sky, the stars, and the universe.” Charlie let the tape run. “You know that right? There is nothing in the entire vastness of space and stars that matters more to me than you do. And I don’t think there ever will be.”
She was about to say goodbye when something on the workbench pulled her attention.
One of the larger fragments, one she’d logged that morning that had been running two degrees warmer than the others, was glowing.
Charlie sat up straight, her chair creaking under her. The fragment pulsed with an iridescence rising in it that threw wrong colors against the inside of her goggles. She leaned forward because something was happening right in front of her that her brain couldn’t explain, and every instinct kicked in at the same time.
She reached out with her bare hand and her palm closed around the fragment.
It was warm. No, it was hot.
Geez, it must really be hot if I can feel it through my gloves—
Wait. Gloves! I took them off to call—
“Well, shit—”
The fragment erupted in light.
A sharp, electric, wrong sound tore through the lab. All the debris on the workbench rattled. The fluorescent lights flickered and then surged. Then the fragment blazed with new light, light that shouldn’t exist, light that had no color and every color all at once, and suddenly, Charlie’s body locked stiff.
Then the light swallowed her.
The phone receiver dropped to the floor of the lab with a crash, swinging from its cord and spinning in the empty space. Her office chair swiveled in rapid circles, eventually slowing to a stop a foot away from where Charlie had just been. She never got the chance to hang up.
***
Two thousand miles away, in a house in Shelbyville, Indiana, Katie Wickett stood in the hallway outside the kitchen of her Mom’s house.
She’d heard the phone ring while Mr. Henderson was explaining something about the gutters, heard the answering machine pick up, heard her Mom’s voice on the recording, causing her heart to clench.
Then she’d heard Charlie.
She stood in the hallway and listened, because Charlie’s voice on the machine sounded different from Charlie’s voice on the phone. It sounded honest.
She heard the apology. She heard “strongest, smartest person I know.” She heard “I trust the woman you’ve become.”
She heard “More than the sky, the stars, and the universe,” and she almost laughed, because it was so perfectly, impossibly Charlie, an engineer who measured love in astronomical units.
At that, she was reaching for the phone on the wall, smiling, ready to pick up and tell Charlie she was a sentimental idiot and she loved her too, when she heard it.
A sound. Strange, electric. Something Katie couldn’t identify.
Then Charlie’s voice, sharp: “Well, shit—”
Then nothing.
Katie grabbed the phone. “Charlie? Charlie!”
Silence.
She hung up and dialed Charlie’s lab number. It rang. And rang. And rang. Nobody answered.
She called and called, every number she could think of.
Katie stood in her parent’s hallway with the phone in her hand and the last thing she’d heard from her sister echoing in her ears.
She knew that something had happened. Something she wouldn’t be able to change.
She dialed the number one more time and pressed the phone so hard against her ear that she’d later discover it left an indent.
It did nothing but echo that infernal ring.
Meanwhile, on an interstellar spaceship called the Emberkind CV-0417, out exploring among the stars in an area of Coalition space, a Kaelari captain named Reyna Solas was having a very bad day.
Author Bio
Elizabeth Hale is a California-based author with a cozy heart, a sharp wit, and strong opinions about hugs (she’s entirely pro). She is powered by books, feelings, sarcasm, and at least one ongoing internal monologue. She spends most of her days playing chauffeur and social planner to her two young humans, helping her wife remember all the things she forgot, and searching for any-sized cool spot in the hot Los Angeles heat. She is deeply family-oriented, hilariously self-aware, and always in search of beauty, belonging, and a life that feels genuine.
She has been writing — professionally, personally, and everything in between — for over twenty years.
Every Almost is her debut novel.
| Author Website | https://www.authorelizabethhale.com |
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