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    Heirs to Trouble: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #26
    Heirs to Trouble: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #26
    Heirs to Trouble: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #26
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Heirs to Trouble: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #26

    By Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

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    About this ebook

    Contains two novelettes in the Liaden Universe®: "Roving Gambler," and "Code of Honor," both set in the turbulent time following Clan Korval's relocation to Surebleak.

    "Roving Gambler," finds Quin yos'Phelium, Boss Conrad's son, and Pat Rin yos'Phelium's heir at loose ends on a bad day. Deliberately overlooked for pilot duty, he is ordered to wait at the Emerald Casino, where he becomes a maelstrom of luck, both good and. . .chancy.

    "Code of Honor," sees Technical Sergeant Tommy Lee called home from the mercs by his delm. He's to become a pawn in a risky game of melant'i, in which the stakes are human lives. However, Tommy Lee has other ideas.

    Both stories were previously published in A Liaden Universe® Constellation, Volume 3, from Baen Books, August 2015.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPinbeam Books
    Release dateNov 26, 2017
    ISBN9780996634670
    Heirs to Trouble: Adventures in the Liaden Universe®, #26
    Author

    Sharon Lee

    Sharon Lee has worked with children of various ages and backgrounds, including a preschool, a local city youth bureau, and both junior and senior high youth groups. She has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and also in psychology. Sharon cares about people and wildlife. She has been an advocate in the fight against human trafficking and a help to stray and feral animals in need.

    Read more from Sharon Lee

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      Book preview

      Heirs to Trouble - Sharon Lee

      Heirs to Trouble

      Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Number 26

      Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

      COPYRIGHT PAGE

      HEIRS TO TROUBLE

      Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Number 26

      © Sharon Lee and Steve Miller November 2017

      Pinbeam Books

      www.pinbeambooks.com

      This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

      portrayed in this novel are fiction or are used fictitiously

      Copyright © November 2017 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. Please remember that distributing an author's work without permission or payment is theft; and that the authors whose works sell best are those most likely to let us publish more of their works.

      Roving Gambler was first published on Splinter Universe, April 2014

      Code of Honor was first published on Splinter Universe in May 2014

      Both stories were collected in A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume 3, Baen Books

      August 2015

      Photo by Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash

      Cover design by Sharon Lee

      ISBN: 978-0-9966346-7-0

      A note on the existence of this echapbook. . .

      Those who have been following the Liaden Universe® and/or the career of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller for a time will know that we'd gotten into the habit of producing chapbooks – 8.5x5.5 inch saddle-stitched pamphlets of 40-60 pages.  The very first Lee-and-Miller chapbook was The Naming of Kinzel, collecting three fantasy stories featuring a well-meaning young wizard named Kinzel, which we published (it says here) in a limited run of 300, on June 20, 1987.

      Later, SRM Publisher was formed, for the purpose of publishing chapbooks containing Lee-and-Miller, Miller, Lee, and, later still, other authors, work.  This was in the age of paper; there were no ereaders, and computer screens were pretty rugged, still.  For seventeen years, starting in1995, SRM Publisher produced at least one chapbook a year, at Yule, containing one or two Liaden stories.

      SRM was closed in 2011, and we quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to break ourselves of writing short stories, so we established Splinter Universe (http://www.splinteruniverse.com), where we would occasionally publish splinters, i.e. pieces of stories or books that never came to completion, and also any new stories we happened to write.

      Ever since SRM closed its doors, there had been a call from the readers who had been with the universe and the authors through all the changes, for the return of chapbooks.  By now, technology had caught up with itself, so the authors began to produce echapbooks, on the model of the first paper chapbooks – and also republished all of SRMs backlist in ebook format.

      At that point, the traditional publisher of our novels, Baen Books, suggested that they collect our stories into what was at first to be one volume.  We agreed, realized that one volume wasn't going to be enough – so eventually A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volumes 1 and 2 were published from Baen. 

      And that, should have been that.

      Except – no, we still couldn't break ourselves of the short story habit, and the Constellations had done well for Baen.  As soon as we had published enough short stories to warrant a book, Baen offered a contract for A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume 3, which took several stories straight off of Splinter Universe.  Those stories were never collected into chapbooks.

      We recently realized that this was the case, and, in the interests of completeness, we have produced two echapbooks, collecting the four stories that were missed.

      This is the second of those two catch up echapbooks, containing two novelettes: Roving Gambler and Code of Honor.

      This is what we said about each of those stories, in Constellation 3:

      Roving Gambler

      At times we, as coauthors, talk about and know so much about what's going on in the universe that we forget that we haven't written it down. Roving Gambler came from that abundance of information – dealing with story stuff that we knew but hadn't quite managed to get into a novel or another short story yet. We have a lot of characters, and they are all involved – even if we haven't had time to write them in. So here's a story featuring Quin – we knew that Quin was isolated, we knew that the arrival of Korval on Liad was not going to be easy on the clan and on Pat Rin. Something, of course, was going to have to happen. Roving Gambler helps get Quin happening.

      Code of Honor

      This story exists because we were plotting a completely different story, and needed a character to. . .do something. . .for the main character. That secondary character came with an utterly fascinating back-story. So fascinating, in fact, that he got his own story, set in the aftermath of I Dare. And yes, we are still planning to write the story that spawned this one, so. . .watch the skies!

      If this is your first time reading these stories, we do hope you enjoy them.  And, for those of you re-reading, we hope you enjoy spending additional time with old friends found again.

      Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

      Cat Farm and Confusion Factory

      November 2017

      Roving Gambler

      He woke instantly, more pilot than person, swinging his legs from the bed as soon as his eyes were open. The three coordinate sets in his head were good enough if there was–

      But there wasn't: the nearest ship deck was a cab ride and check-in away. The coords got mentally filed away in order, Lytaxin, Springwood, Tinsori Light. Well, that last one, that was one he'd been supposed to forget, to put out of his head as a last resort just ahead of, or maybe behind, Jumping into a sun. He'd not have had it at all except for the oddity of his grandmother knowing it, though she was not now and never had been a pilot.

      Not dressed yet, Quin yos'Phelium Clan Korval stood in the cold of the near attic, falling into a dance routine to steady himself to gravity before he dressed. Surebleak's gravity was a bit light to his standards, not that the planet knew nor cared. Odd that he should still be dancing to the gravity of a world and school he'd been pulled from because of Plan B–but his small class at Trigrace was long graduated and he'd not be back there, probably ever.

      There was a cat, briefly, a quick strop against his bare legs and away, regally.

      Silk, he called. Silk? He could use a moment of cat-time. . .

      When calling the cat's name didn't halt the move toward the mystery space beneath the bookcase he made the silly Terran catchacat-catchacat sound this household preferred to the more sibilant Liaden fizwisswisswiss...

      Cat eyes glowed at him momentarily from the cat-way, gave a slow, comforting blink, and then melted soundlessly into shadow.

      Tomorrow, he offered at the disappeared cat, and finished his stretches. His ring flashed in the morning light, reminding him he'd not chosen an earring yet. . .and that he was finally due for a quiet dinner with his father, the Boss.

      #

      It was Quin's rule never to leave his rooms without a gun–that had been the rule on the Rock, after all, to always go armed–and he'd not forgotten the memorable dust-up on the occasion of the recent All Boss party at Jelaza Kazone, where Cousin Theo'd showed Padi and him that, however good their training, they'd much to learn.

      He'd been on the fringe of the action there–truthfully it was a good thing he'd not been in the middle of it else his martial failings would have surely been revealed to all.

      But that action had been proof that things weren't settled here, so armed he and all the clan went.

      Generally he had at least his gun, his backup, and knife. No one gainsaid him this–the clan was sure enough of him not to be concerned he'd misuse them and fond enough of him to permit what was hardly an ill-conceived notion on the chaotically burgeoning portside of Surebleak.

      The guns

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