The StrandingRings of Almanidus
Maren Linden traded her future to keep her brother out of the war. Now she's a shuttle pilot on a Hegemony carrier who has run out of patience with the war and with the men on board. Then a routine jump goes wrong. She crashes on an uncharted world with a broken leg, a dead captain and one other survivor: a seven-foot enemy warrior with feathers, a sword and a very rigid idea of what a female is supposed to be. They have no shared language and three days of food, and they have every reason to kill each other. What starts as a wary truce turns into something neither of them was built for, and it wakes an ancient power in Maren that could change the rules of two empires. Rings of Almanidus is a slow-burn sci-fi romance about two soldiers on opposite sides who find the lies behind their war. Maren doesn't need saving. She's the one who does the saving, and she's done being the one her family could spare.
- Science fiction
Reading order
The books
- The Stranding
From the preface
A Note Before We Crash
This book has been living in my head for a while. It paid no rent, took over the good pillow, and wouldn’t leave until I wrote it down.
I love science fiction. Ships, jumps, the fact that one bad calculation turns you into a debris field. Some of that science is a little made up, but it plays by its own rules. It isn't magic. But I wanted some fantasy in this story too; a little shimmer at the edges. So say hello to the Almanidians.
The Almanidians are tall, feathered and very serious. They have a power called the force, and they believe it belongs only to their species. (Do they have that right? Shhh. Spoilers.) Their whole culture runs on a warrior's code of honor. It's rigid and it's beautiful, and they've never once considered that it might be wrong about something. You can probably guess how that goes for them.
The sci-fi wasn't the hard part to write. Neither was the fantasy. The hard part was that this book has real spice in it, the kind I've never put on paper before. There were days I typed a scene, looked at it, closed the laptop and went to stare at the fridge for a while. Then I came back and wrote it anyway, because it belongs in the story. These characters earn every one of those moments, and leaving them out would have been lying to you.
So consider yourself warned, and welcome. Buckle up, keep your hands inside the shuttle, and don’t mind the feathers.