Kerry Truelove, writer

Chaldinor

It seemed to take a long time before the pathetic force of SGF personnel reported back;  Vane, his voice quite toneless to mask how he felt.

“We’ve found One Platoon, sir.  Two of them are alive and able to report, but we need an ICU for Captain Hendrixn.  No-one else from One Platoon is alive.  We’ve also found a few of the dead hostiles.  But there’s nothing else left-  I mean the fight’s gone.”

“Any sign of the ACES people?”

“A little – I mean there are a few…remains here.  It looks as if the hostiles were here earlier, left and came back.  The-  The records show several were interred in Sick Bay before the hostiles came, largely from disease.  Then the record stops,” Vane fell silent for a long time.  Ryan was beginning to wonder what had happened when the SGF man spoke again, sounding much more confident, “seventeen died of disease, but they developed a cure.  Then another six seemed to have succumbed to the dust;  nine asphyxiated; one just died, I guess because they didn’t want to live.  According to the personnel records, that left a body of a hundred and fifteen people.  We’ve found the bodies of nineteen or twenty of them.  But there are parts of the installation that have been blown up, so there could be a lot more dead, we just can’t find any remains.  We’ve found none alive, none at all.  The two survivors from One Platoon report that they just came on the hostiles and before they could be friendly the hostiles attacked.  We need that ICU, sir, Captain Hendrixn’s a mess.  And we have no medic any more.”

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All contact with the ACES installation on distant Boreaster has been lost.  Perhaps one of the planet’s spectacular storms is to blame, but as Boreaster is on the edge of Civitas space the Company persuades Earth Government to send in a small military force to investigate.  The only non-military personnel on the expeditionary force are two ACES experts on alien life forms.  Only one has any first-hand experience of the planet and its biota, but even she cannot anticipate what happens when they land.

On the colony planet of Chaldinor, a storm of a different nature has erupted.  Some years ago a meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed insurrection toppled the government.  Now three warring factions claim they are the legitimate government of the planet, and while they argue, anarchy prevails.  Frustrated by the stalemate, the Civitas turns to adjudication in a last-ditch hope to resolve the issue;  if adjudication fails, the Civitas has no option but to evict the tiresome planet from its membership.

In Earth Station, placidly orbiting around the planet, another storm is developing around a single prisoner, a lost soul convicted for life on multiple counts of murder who is driven by imperatives not even she can fully understand.  While the Adjudicator deals with Chaldinor and Earth Government deals with Boreaster, Integrol Inspectors Hadrenan and Tsenanegar and their staff have to deal with the storm growing within their station.  What they uncover proves to be something never experienced in the Civitas and Earth alike, something that threads to far-off Chaldinor and turbulent Boreaster.

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I’ve no clear idea where the story of  Chaldinor came from, apart from that its genesis was at some time during the later years of my Public Service career.  I know that I had a vague idea of writing a story about two people who shared a single characteristic and whose identities got muddled because of that, but as I started writing it, the story decided to go somewhere else.  My attempts to return to the original idea got me nowhere – that plot had been thoroughly superceded. All I managed to salvage of it was the concept of those two people with a single shared characteristic.  

I admit I am biased, but I think the direction the story took is much more interesting.

I would like to acknowledge the cover artwork by Adam Lockier, who at the time was employed at Digital Print Australia. He took one of my vague sketches and a rambling explanation of my ‘vision’, and converted it into an image which captured precisely what I wanted.

My vague ‘conceptual’ sketch for the cover

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Interested in exploring more? Copies of Chaldinor can be obtained from the following online booksellers:

Print on demand: ISBN   978-0-6489892-0-2

e-book: ISBN   978-0-6489892-2-6