Iolanthe

Book 3: Spectre War

by Margaret Fortune

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Cyberpunk; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Return to the world of the Spectre War in the third installment of this thrilling space opera saga.

On a forgotten planet in the midst of an interstellar war, a resistance leader will rise.
 
Teal Sorenson has lost everything in the two years since the alien Spectres descended upon the Celestial Expanse: family, friends, even her home. Now condemned to exile on the jungle planet Iolanthe, she can only watch the war from afar…until a chance invasion sends her fleeing into the night.
 
With the colony overrun, the only place left to go is the jungle, and yet as Teal struggles to survive in a savage alien rainforest that could as easily kill her as save her, she realizes this invasion is more than just a simple offensive strike. Iolanthe has nothing to tempt the enemy: no resources, no strategic value, no military presence. So why are they really here?
 
The answer could spell the end of the war, and the human race along with it. Now only Teal and a ragtag band of survivors stand between the enemy and certain victory. Mere survival is no longer enough. It’s time to fight.
 
The battle for Iolanthe has begun.

Release date: February 22, 2022

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 633

Sample

1
The Sheridan Academy for Tomorrow’s Luminaries
Settlement 4, Iolanthe
It’s raining again.
I push away from the desk, lean back in my chair, and watch it come. The rain falls so softly today I didn’t even hear it begin, quiet fingers of water licking down the windowpane in companionable silence even as I bent over my books, unaware. I could smell it, though—the fresh scent of new water spiked through with citrus and spice, heat and humidity. Even with the window barely ajar, it still fills the room, seeping into every nook and cranny until it’s impossible to tell where the Rainforest ends and the academy begins.
I run my finger lightly over the thorny tendrils curling through the gap between the sash and the sill. Though I opened the window only yesterday morning, already the Rainforest has found her way in, small vines punching through the screen to creep across the glass in every direction. I should close the window now, before the vines can get any farther, but I can’t seem to make myself do it. After so many years of living on a space station, to be planetside again—to see real rain, to feel real atmosphere—is a wonder I can’t get over, though it rains nearly every day here. It’s one of the few things that makes my exile to this stars-forsaken place bearable.
Exile. That’s what it feels like, though I suppose when you help someone blow up the space station you live on, you can’t expect anything else.
My chest tightens the slightest bit, the way it always does when I think of New Sol, the breath in my lungs catching for just the briefest instant before once again releasing. I’ve buried myself in homework all day, as though I could somehow make myself forget what day it is, but it’s no use. All those past sins, both mine own and the ones forced upon me, are etched in bloody furrows over my heart, and no distraction, no matter how powerful, can make me forget.
I have to make the call.
He won’t answer, of course, even if he’s free. He won’t call me back; he won’t send me a link. For all I know, he’ll delete my message without ever watching it. But I have to make the call anyway. For him, and for her.
My chit, embedded in the fleshy ball of my thumb, pulses softly through my palm as I activate communications. I wave away StarCom’s logo—a trail of glowing stars in ever-diminishing bands of green, white, and blue—and enter Michael’s link number. His image comes up over my palm along with a request to confirm the recipient.
My finger wavers over the prompt, heart stuttering as I stare at my brother’s holo. His directory image has changed since the last time I called, and seeing him now is like a punch to the gut. The boy I knew is gone, and in his place is a man, hard and dark and lean. His features might as well have been lased in tritanium, they’re so flat and emotionless. Not that I expected him to be smiling in his holo. No, he lost his smile the day he lost her.
The day I failed to save her.
Even though I haven’t spoken to him in over a year and half, I can still hear Michael’s voice in my head that last day we argued.
You knew what she was going to do! How could you’ve ever let her go?
And my reply: I let her go because I knew what she was going to do.
He’d never been able to understand my answer. Not the first or the second or the fiftieth time I’d tried to explain it. Not in all the months after he left, in the calls upon calls I made, trying to get him to see. Because in his eyes, I killed her. Or at least, I let her kill herself. It comes out to the same thing. And after all this time, despite all my arguments to the contrary, sometimes I find myself wondering if the distinction ever really mattered at all.
I stare at Michael’s hard-faced holo hovering just over my palm, and suddenly it all seems so pointless. Lia is dead, and Michael will never forgive me for it. Not two years ago, when she died, not now, not ever. And I can say I’m sorry again and again until the day I die, but I’ll never be able to fix it. I’ll never be able to bring Lia back or make Michael forgive me. And it doesn’t matter whether I was right or wrong, because no matter which one it was, in the end I’m still alone.
“Shh, it’s okay. Mom and Dad may be gone, but I’m still here. It’s you and me now, Teal. From this day on, it’ll always be the two of us.”
A soft sniffle in the dark. Then—“You promise?”
He doesn’t hesitate for an instant. “I promise.”
My heart lurches at the memory, burned by a promise made half a lifetime ago, now lying shattered on the floor as though it never meant anything.
I snap my hand closed, severing the link, and in that awful moment when his face disappears, I finally admit what I’ve been trying to deny to myself every day since that moment Lia perished in a burst of light this very day two years ago.
Some promises, once broken, are broken forever.