Aurora Springer: Natural Gills? Snippet from EUROPA for #WeWriWa

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Natural Gills? Snippet from EUROPA for #WeWriWa

Welcome to another Sunday with Weekend Writing Warriors. Meet writers in various genres and read 8-10 sentence snippets of their stories. Find a new author and sample their work. Enjoy!

My new story, Alarik, book 4 in my series, Taxyon Space is at the awkward stage, so I’ve switched to snippets from the first book, Europa. This series stars alien mermen, Warrish, who have been secretly observing humans from a submarine base in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon.

Blurb

Dr. Nikki Bell’s plan to discover intelligent life on Jupiter’s moon hits a rocky start when her spaceship crashes on the icy surface of Europa. Seconds before she blacks out, she spies a man’s face in the water beneath the ice. When she wakes on the submarine Station, nobody believes her story. Convinced the mysterious stranger saved her life, Nikki searches for him while she explores the ocean and its alien inhabitants.

Kiron Arqin Ramis chose exile as a Watcher on a remote outpost to redeem his family’s honor. He never expected to find an attractive Earther woman close to death. He violates the prime policy by rescuing her. Despite suffering the penalty, he strives to warn her about his hostile leaders.

Nikki’s unexpected meeting with Kiron triggers a chain of disasters in Europa’s perilous oceans. Can the daredevil scientist and scarred Watcher forge a new alliance despite their people’s antagonism?

Introduction for snippet: While exploring the oceans of Europa, Nikki has escaped from large manta-like predators by hiding in a coral forest. Peering out of the coral branches, she spies six “mermen” hunting sea creatures in a clearing.

You can read last week’s snippet at https://auroraspringer.blogspot.com/2019/10/six-strangers-snippet-from-europa-for.html

I’ve skipped a little ahead, and altered punctuation to fit.

Nikki stared in growing delight. Other people lived in the seas of Europa, people like the man she had seen beneath the ice. Where in styx had they come from? Their humanoid skeletal structures were an anomaly in these dark waters; none of the animals she had encountered had internal bony skeletons nor had her predecessors’ notes indicated the presence of vertebrates.

She inspected the back of nearest stranger from the safety of her hiding place. He bore a tube in a green scaled harness on his back and wore leggings of darker scales; his blue hair stood upright on the top of his head. He turned slightly, revealing a sharp-featured face with tightly spiraled mustache of the same blue as his short hair. Parallel slits ran above his ribs, narrow openings filled with pink filaments - gills, she guessed. Were the gills natural, or a genetic modification, engineered like her hemoglobin for living underwater?

Swinging around, he brandished a harpoon with a cruel barbed tip.