Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/25
Del doesn't interrogate well when she's angry. Nobody does, really.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about a mysterious stranger and a place called Aluna.”
“I got nothing to say to you,” the man responded.
“That would make this an awfully boring conversation.”
The man just glared at her.
She continued anyway. “You met some guy at Aluna, right?” His face registered surprise. Guess he didn’t need to speak for this to work after all.
“He told you I was responsible for the death of your husband, Ashur. I wasn’t. I don’t know who he was, or where this Aluna place is, but I didn’t kill anyone there. Someone suckered you into trying to kill me. Which means there’s someone out there who wants me dead. Somebody who’s not above hiring extremely gullible people who’ll rush across the system to commit murder based on nothing more than his word.
“Now, since you’re not the only stupid people out here, he’s likely to try again. So, I hope you can understand why I want to find out who this is, and why he wants me dead. Or, at the very least, stop him before he gets more people like you killed. You gonna tell me what I want to know, or do you want to just sit here on this rock until you rot?”

November 26, 2025 at 1:40 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/23
What Del doesn't know is that there have been three attempts to unite all of Earth, the last of which fell apart a hundred years before she was born:
1. The League of Nations
2. The United Nations
3. The Earth Global Council.

The news she could find from outside the Belt was the same as it always was, which was why she never bothered with it. More wars on Earth, more talk of forming a new all-nation organization. That sort of thing had come up every few years as long as she could remember and always quickly fell apart over infighting, arguing over religion or resource allocation, or allowing people to move from one region to another. Whichever region was doing well at the time was always against it, fearing being flooded by people from the rest of the planet. Then, when the isolated pockets of prosperity shifted again, the same arguments sprang up again with everyone on different sides.
On Mars, yet another group of terraformers was petitioning the Martian Authority with their newest plan. Such plans seemed perpetually "under consideration." Mars had about as much chance of ever being terraformed as Earth did of being united.

November 26, 2025 at 1:03 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/22
Another word used exactly once in the entire book.

"Sorry," Bilan said, and dropped the card face up on the couch beside Jie's. The image was of a woman sitting on a throne holding a book. Behind her was a great window looking out on Mars. She was wearing light robes, the same red as the landscape, with one breast exposed and one covered. The words Alta Pastrino were written along the bottom.
"Why did you choose that one?" Del asked.
"I thought she was pretty."
The card represented intuition or secret knowledge. They'd each chosen appropriate cards. She shook her head to clear it. Telepathy, she was almost ready to believe in. Tarot cards would take a while.
"What does that mean?" Bilan said.
"It doesn't mean anything," Jie said. "It's not evidence either way."
"No, I mean, what does the card mean?" she asked. "All the cards have a meaning, right?"
"It depends a lot on context," Del said. "Draw one more at random and we'll see. It takes at least three to do a proper reading."
Bilan pulled a card from the middle of the deck and dropped it face up on top of the other two. It showed a single crystal goblet. It was full of water, overflowing and splashing onto the red rock it sat on.
Tasoj was written across the bottom.

November 26, 2025 at 12:54 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/21
Del may not be well educated, but she's always been resourceful.

The materials didn't completely go to waste, though. She hauled the box back to the office and dumped the contents out. Throwing drill, tubes, metal containers, and finally the boxes themselves, randomly into the air. It wasn't senseless destruction, this time. Lacking gravity or any kind of exercise equipment, she had to come up with a way of slowing muscle loss. All the debris in the office would serve as her obstacle course. Pushing off hard from one end, she could travel, twisting, turning, dodging, or grabbing at the heavy items, trying to avoid injury as she went, before hitting the other end and repeating the process in the other direction. It wasn't a perfect exercise, but it worked. There were a large number of very small, sharp pieces along with the heavier ones. The minor danger kept her awareness present where it should be as she ran the ever changing course over and over. Even being careful, she picked up a few new cuts and bruises with almost every session.

November 26, 2025 at 12:47 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/20
Catching up again - I was out of town for the weekend seeing a punk band in LA.

Bilan turned the deck over in her hand and looked at the cards. "These are beautiful, Del. Where did you get them?"
"One of my foster brothers gave them to me when I was six."
"What is that in human years?" Jie asked.
She scowled at him but appreciated the attempt at humor to lighten the mood. "About twelve standards. He was nine - eighteen standards. Despite our age differences, he always treated me well. It was a good year." They were her favorite of her fosters, and she thought they'd all bonded to a point where they were going to keep her, but at the end of the year they hadn't renewed the contract.
"You must have been fond of him. I thought you didn't bring anything with you from Mars."
"I brought a few things. These. A book."
"What book?" Bilan asked.
"The Martian Chronicles."
"By Ray Bradbury?"
"Yeah. It was required reading at one of my schools," Del replied. "During my tunnel rat days, I mentioned I liked it, so a friend gave me his special sesquicentennial printing. Then he laughed at me for not realizing it wasn't a history."

November 26, 2025 at 12:33 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/19
Everybody wants the data core.
So far, nobody's asked me about the second person.

“Then are you here about my little package?” he asked.
“No interest in your little package," she replied. "But the box you gave me is on its merry way to Mars as we speak.” She'd received confirmation that the package had shipped without inspection just about an hour ago.
“If not the package and not the protocol, what does bring you out to my little rock? Could this be a social visit?”
“I’m here as a customer this time.”
“Ah. I see. And what might I have that would be of interest to you?”
“There was a data core in the salvage I pointed you to,” she said, intentionally including the not-so-subtle reminder of why he had it.
“Now, that’s interesting,” Kenny replied. “I think I charged far too little for that core.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are the third person to ask for it.”

November 19, 2025 at 5:16 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/18
Reversing acceleration is the closest I could get.
I hate using the word "decelerate" just because of the inaccuracy, but all of my beta readers were confused when I said a ship was accelerating away from Ceres while approaching it, which is how it actually works.

"How are they going to move the ship? It doesn't have enough fuel to get anywhere."
"They could tow it, or bring fuel, or just do a ballistic shot."
"Like a Hohmann ship?"
"Kind of, only instead of being set on a low-energy orbit, they accelerate in the right direction, let it drift for a while, then decelerate when it gets there. The same thing it normally does, actually, only instead of a couple of minutes in turn around, it's at zero G for most of the trip. That's probably what this ship usually does traveling between planets."

November 18, 2025 at 5:45 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/17
My first drafts are done long hand, then typed into the computer. I'm going to have to get more in soon or I'll run out of excerpts. The first three I looked at with "spend" in them, I'd already used. :)

She wondered if her bike was still outside somewhere, faithfully keeping station as she'd instructed it to. She opened the inner airlock door and peered out the outer window. She couldn't see it, but it could be just around the corner, out of her sight. She looked again at the wall button on the door. If her bike was nearby, she could override the safety, spot it, leap through open space, and drive it right back through the open airlock, then close it again before she passed out and died. The more she thought about it over the days, the more plausible the plan was.
She could do it. She was nearly there—ready for one last, desperate, literal do-or-die rush for her bike when she stopped, backed away, and left the airlock. It couldn't work. Even if the bike was there, the blast of air would blow her right by it. Without a suit to send any commands, it would sit there, unmoving as she sped by, spending her last remaining seconds of consciousness watching it recede into the distance.

November 17, 2025 at 8:46 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/16
Del tries to create a diversion.
And for once, she's not the one doing the running here.

The people inside were already buzzing excitedly as she entered. The woman from the hall must have told them she was here. Good.
"Listen up!" she shouted over the din, raising her rifle for emphasis. "Mealtime's over. I'm going to blow out that window and if you don't want to get blown out into space with me, get into a room up the hall now and close the door behind you."
She stepped away from the open door to give them room to pass.
"I've already called the Enforcers," the woman from the halls said. "They're on the way down here now."
"You'd better hurry, then!" Del replied. "Because that doesn't give me much time."
She went to the window and pulled out three meters of breaching cable and began sticking it in a large circle, while the crowd watched in horror. She pointed Jie's snake rifle at the nearest one and none of the rest moved forward to stop her.
"What are you waiting for?" she asked, then shouted as loudly as she could, "Run!"

November 16, 2025 at 8:28 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/15
He's really not being entirely fair to Del here.

As he spoke, Del began falling slowly toward one wall.
The Veteran had planted his feet on a railing and was holding on. "I'm afraid you'll have to be staying for a while," he said. "You may eventually come to see things correctly, but for now you're still too young and naive. You want everything to be perfect and are willing to scrap good progress because it's not. You don't understand how bad things can get."
Del tried to scramble back up to where he was standing, far above her now.
He was still speaking. His voice seemed to echo from a distance. "You've never known true hardship. You think you have, but you haven't. And we almost lost the Rabbit because of you. You would be his undoing, and you've never cared about anyone else enough to worry about whether they suffer or not."

November 16, 2025 at 8:22 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/14
Going from danger to danger, but first, let's pause for an exciting discussion about network security! :)

"Yeah, here, gotta give you access from the console," Del said. She approached one of the other stations and pulled up the security interface. It recognized Del and seeing Bilan in the central seat, offered to give her authorization as well.
Del confirmed.
"I couldn't get anything but the coms to interface with my suit," Del apologized.
"That's probably by design," Bilan said. "Partly for security - you wouldn't want someone outside the ship steering it into a planet or opening all the pressure doors at once and venting you into space."
"Makes sense, I guess," Del said. She shuddered at the thought, and wondered if her parents' ship had had that same safety feature. Might their demise not have been an accident?
"An even more important reason might be crew psychology," Bilan continued. "Ships like this can spend a lot of time drifting through space. They'll head to, say, Earth, by burning for a few hours, maybe, then cutting back to zero, or very low thrust, for most of the trip. It could take weeks or even months before they get there. Having tasks that can only be done at certain stations forces the crew to interact and move around. There probably aren't any cleaning bots either. Everything would have to be done by hand."

November 14, 2025 at 3:16 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/13
Del, ever the pragmatist.

Ten, maybe twenty years, slaving away in the antimatter mines and if she somehow survived that, she'd eventually be free. Free, broke, homeless, unable to find legitimate work…
She wondered what the Belt would be like in twenty years. Would Jie's dream of it becoming a real society have come true by then? That would be nice. Maybe he would be an administrator, and she could come back and cause trouble. Pull together whatever contacts she could find. Become a fixer like Kenny. Kenny would most likely be dead by then. There's no way he'd last two more decades out here. The Rabbit might. How much would he control by then? Would she have to fight him, or eliminate him to build up her own little criminal empire before she died? It would be fun trying.

November 14, 2025 at 5:53 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/12
When nothing else is available, it makes a handy weapon.

When she got to the open cell and peeked her head in, it was empty. She was about to turn back and call to Bilan when something flew down and struck her in the face. She moved to the side to avoid most of the blow and a weight landed on her back. Someone had dropped from the ceiling onto her shoulders. They slung what felt like some sort of cloth across the front of her throat and began tightening it from behind.
She turned slightly and threw herself backward, hoping to slam her attacker into the door frame, but they turned with her, pulling her sideways and she hit it with her shoulder. Then the tension on the cloth lessened and her attacker dropped nimbly to the floor.
"Del?" her assailant said in surprise.
Amelia stood before her, holding a pyjama top similar to what Del had worn in the BeltSec prison, tightly wrapped in her hand.
"Gah," Del said, and rubbed at her abused throat. "Not the greeting I was expecting."
"Sorry. I thought you were someone else."
"I gathered. Let's get out of here. Bilan's up the hall."
Amelia unwrapped her shirt and put it on as she followed Del back up the hall.

November 14, 2025 at 5:47 AM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/11
This was about as close as I could get to it.

Finally, she saw the approaching lights of an automated craft bearing two new engines. She spent another hour swapping them out. The damaged parts, she pushed off toward the asteroid. BeltSec could pick them up when the Salvage and Forensics crew got here. With full power restored, she connected her suit to the bike’s systems and let the suit charge as the bike replaced her recirculated air and water with its own. She pulled a balloon cover from the back over the entire bike and let it pressurize.
When it had finished filling, Del opened her helmet and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Then she retrieved a pair of nutrition bars from a small compartment. It was the first solid food she'd had for nearly twenty hours.

November 11, 2025 at 8:42 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/10
Del showing her typical diligence at her job.

Once she arrived at the tiny asteroid, Del checked in at the small mining office and spent just enough time to remind them that BeltSec still existed and to confirm that the base hadn’t been taken over by pirates. If it had been, the pirates were wearing the uniform of the local corp and following standard bureaucratic procedures, which was close enough. Forty-six hours of flight to spend less than half an hour there.

November 11, 2025 at 8:35 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#NovemberWorldbuilders
Three black things in this image by @aureolinflax.bsky.social of a scene from Thoughtless: The walls of Del's carbonaceous asteroid home (that she's hung colorful scarves over to make it feel less oppressive), space itself (seen out the window) and their BeltSec uniforms.

November 8, 2025 at 8:10 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/8
Just Del being mercenary again.

Nineteen minutes later, her small craft turned itself around and began slowing down to match the speed of her destination. She had heard no further signals in all that time, and her calls to the asteroid went unanswered.
When Del was close enough for her bike's sensors to pick up a visual, she brought the feed up on her suit's faceplate. A jagged cut marred the side of the rock. There must have been a contained atmosphere inside. Contained no longer, debris was floating away from the damaged area. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction she was heading, but was still too far away to see anything with the naked eye. She zoomed in on the display and saw bodies amongst the debris. Exactly what she’d feared.
"Egido! Protektu viajn infanojn," she said out loud, a quick prayer to a goddess she didn’t believe in. If there were any survivors, footage of a rescue could end up being worth more than the bonus. She only felt a little guilty for thinking it.

November 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/7
Just Del being reckless again.

She considered that for a second. Someone had already tried to kill her. This was the type of operation that should really be undertaken by a team of Enforcers with breaching cord, explosives, and armored vacsuits, not one woman with a wrist-mounted needler and a hand-held vacuum torch. But she wanted answers. This would be a great time to have a mining platform handy. Or maybe a missile or two. She’d really have to get those replaced when she got back to Ceres.
The airlock fell open as she finished cutting off its latch. She hoped the inhabitants had a different way out. Or at least vacuum suits because when she left, she’d have to open that outer door and all the air in this hallway would rush out behind her.
She lowered her helmet and a rancid smell assaulted her nose. The scent of molten metal mingled with that of a ship that had been a long way out of port. She listened for movement and heard none. No heavy breathing or bump of heavy equipment along the narrow corridor. And most importantly, no ominous hum of a plasma cannon getting ready to fire.

November 8, 2025 at 7:54 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/5
Searching for the word really made me realize how many times someone - especially Del - starts to say something then trails off.

"And you…what, locked them in and stole their ship?"
"That's the short version, though I didn't steal it. It was lawfully given to me as the penalty for their attempt on my life. It was the alternative to formal charges, which would have sent them, most likely, to spending the rest of their lives as indentured servants on Mercury."
"That ship is their life."
"No, their lives are their lives. You know, the thing they wanted to take from me. Without the ship, they'll have to get real jobs like the rest of us."
Del could tell he didn't like it. Inside, he was seething. But he knew she was right.
"If they tried to kill you, how come you let them live?"
It was the same question Nurayda had asked.
"Because, unlike your girlfriend, I'm not a murderer," Del answered this time.
"Nurayda's not…" he started then trailed off. Del guessed he was right, but he himself wasn't so sure. They'd have a lot to talk about if they ever saw each other again.

November 5, 2025 at 7:50 PM

Pat Luther

@plutherus.bsky.social

#WIPSnips 11/4
It's funny that out of all the things made of it (Iron and Carbon are two of the most common elements in the asteroid belt after all), I mention the word exactly once in whole book.