Sunday Snippet: Keeping Up With Honor

Happy holiday season to everyone! I'm ready for a busy week and a quiet Christmas. We're always pretty low-key and this year my oldest is in the middle of moving out for the first time. I'm thrilled for him but don't envy the chaos. Moving is challenging when it isn't the holiday. LOL

Didn't get much television watched this week. Have an ongoing project that's due by the beginning of January and I'm focused on getting it finished up.

I did listen to a lot of holiday tunes while working and I got sucked into a Scorpion binge marathon. Other than that, I watched the usual classic Perry Mason and The Saint.

Looking forward possibly getting to the movies I'd like to watch this week.

Tonight's post is from Keeping Up With Honor, a novella that got a start with a writing community prompt.

Here's the mini-blurb:

Honor Brock goes against orders and runs a fool's mission to find a lost artifact. Rush Masterson tests a theory and risks his life to track her down. Once he finds her, he has to keep up because Honor won't go back until she has what she wants.

And a sneaky peek…

"Holy shit. I made it." Her stomach roiled dangerously, but their former home planet filled her canopy screen.

She needed to land, secure the plane, then find the artifact. Guiding her bird toward the planet, she rode the hard slide through the atmosphere, ignoring all the alarms beeping, buzzing, screeching, and blinking. She brought the plane down—none too gently—on what used to be a super boulevard. They'd only been gone a few months and already the paved lanes were warping from disuse.

Popping the canopy, she checked the oxygen levels. "Less than normal, but breathable." She grabbed her bag, tossed it over the side then maneuvered out onto the wing and did a slippery dance to the edge.

How she managed to get off with breaking a limb, she didn't know. She did burn the tips of her fingers through her gloves, the metal still hot from breaking atmosphere.

Shaking off the sting, she glanced around. "First things first, find a way back into the plane." She wanted to get the artifact, load up, and get back to the fleet.

Spotting a hotel across the boulevard, she ducked inside. Luckily, she had good light streaming in from the atrium. She entered a staff-access hallway and foraged around for a ladder. She found one tucked underneath a stairwell and grabbed it. Crossing the road, she set against her craft and checked over the plane—a sinking feeling settled in her gut when she discovered her jump drive to be toast.

Climbing down the ladder, she sighed. "New list. Get the artifact, fix the damn plane—or find another way off the planet—and get back to the fleet." Her heart kicked in her chest. "Then beg for forgiveness." She went back into the hotel. "Might as well use this as my base of operations."

She started to shrug out of her flight suit and freaked the hell out when the almost spooky silence in the city broke from a loud boom in the air above the building. "Sounds like a hopper entering the atmosphere." Kicking the suit aside, she darted outside, her mouth gaping, to see a hopper with the ship insignia emblazoned on the side. "No fucking way."

Shock and trepidation filled her—along with a solid streak of admiration. Only one person would have the pull and the balls to follow her—and the knowledge to make it happen.

Her breath whooshed out. "Rush."

He set the craft down about a hundred meters from her ship and cut the engines. The silence rushed back, with the sound of her breathing and the snap and pop of metal cooling echoing around her to break the eerie quiet. Only she heard the thunder in her ears from the flurry of emotions running through her mind.

Honor squared her shoulders and waited for the hatch to open. "Time to face some righteous wrath."

I'm honestly thrilled with how this one is going. Honor and Rush have some differences to settle and there's no better place than an empty planet.

That's it for this week. Catch everyone on the flipside.

ML Skye