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    Great Expectorations and Other Tales
    Great Expectorations and Other Tales
    Great Expectorations and Other Tales
    Ebook45 pages36 minutes

    Great Expectorations and Other Tales

    By Christie Meierz

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    About this ebook

    Three short stories by the award-winning author of The Marann.

    In the title story, Cassie Johnson is a debt worker just starting a new life on a new planet. When she finds a pest in the basement of a building she’s inspecting, things change.

    In Stake Seasoning, Tip and Anton use a secret ingredient at their swanky Hollywood steak house.

    And Jessica finds herself at the end of the world in Rider of the Forgotten Apocalypse.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristie Meierz
    Release dateApr 14, 2013
    ISBN9781301928965
    Great Expectorations and Other Tales
    Author

    Christie Meierz

    Christie lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, her son, her piano, and a very sharp oboe. When she's not writing, she enjoys reading, quilting, knitting, and trying to keep her menfolk from telling odious puns.

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      Book preview

      Great Expectorations and Other Tales - Christie Meierz

      Great Expectorations

      and Other Tales

      Christie Meierz

      Copyright © 2013 by Christie Meierz

      All rights reserved.

      Cover design by Laura Shinn

      No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

      image-placeholder

      To find out more about Tolari Space and get a free ebook, go to

      christiemeierz.com/welcome

      image-placeholder

      Contents

      Great Expectorations

      Stake Seasoning

      Rider of the Forgotten Apocalypse

      Christie's Novels

      About the Author

      Great Expectorations

      Why anyone would go halfway across the Orion arm and then recreate the city of Pittsburgh—backwards—was well beyond Cassie Johnson’s ability to imagine. Yet that’s what the founding colonists had done, when they discovered a triangle of land on the planet Hlatra that was as close as makes no never mind to the size and shape of the one on which Pittsburgh sat, back on Earth.

      Of course, it pointed east instead of west. The colonists just thought that was funny and recreated a mirror image of the city, complete with a fountain at the confluence of the rivers, sports arenas, more bridges than you could shake a stick at, and a bunch of tall buildings in a small, compact city center. The net effect being for recently-arrived Cassie, who was born in Atlanta but spent her teenage years in the real Pittsburgh, thank you very much, was that she usually went the wrong direction no matter where she was trying to go.

      Her boss, who grew up in New Pittsburgh, thought that was high-larious. But what else could she expect from someone born on a planet with a name that meant laughter in some ancient Earth language?

      Damn neo-Vikings. You’d think the original Norwegian settlers would have found a nice fjord and duplicated Oslo or something. Since most of them looked the way folks imagined Vikings did, tall and blond and blue-eyed, that would have made more sense. She looked down at herself past a nose that could shelter children from the sun. Short and brunette. Yeah. I really fit in here. She snorted. And realized she was driving the company shuttle the wrong way. Again.

      This time, she was only five minutes late to inspect New Pittsburgh’s tallest skyscraper, a sixty-four story steel-and-glass monstrosity with three corners instead of four. The building’s AI had reported a load-bearing column gone offline, and the boss sent the new girl, of course. She used the maintenance passcode to let herself into the basement through the service door.

      On Earth, in the real Pittsburgh, this building’s basement was a multi-level car park. Here, it was just a single floor of storage space, though she couldn’t think how it was a good use of it to put bus-sized rectangular storage boxes in a three-sided room. She tilted her nose up and took a good long sniff. It smelled like rust. That was her first clue.

      Well no, her first clue was that the tower was framed in steel, which was a frankly stupid thing to do on Hlatra. The smell of rust permeating the dusty air was her second clue. She glanced at the building’s health read-out and headed for the source

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