Tuesday's Short - The Medusa's Starman

This week’s short story takes us from a fantasy setting where spiders are a race unto themselves to a science fiction setting where a starship pilot is lost in the warp. Welcome to The Medusa's Starman. 

When the battlespike Oliver is flying is hit as he seeks shelter in the warp, life as he knows it ends. On the other side of the warp waits a new world, a new life, and whole new set of dangers, and Oliver is going to have to pick things up fast, if he is to survive. Will the lady from the caves be his salvation, or will she finish what the crash began?

The Medusa's Starman (Excerpt)

Oliver took the planetary descent the hard way—he lost two engines to a phaser burst, as he pushed them to warp—and then lost the other two getting the ship back out again. Battlespikes were not meant to be flown like that. The Stars knew where he’d re-emerge… or if he’d emerge at all.

But the Stars were kind, and he came out of warp, like an overthrown spear. The spike angled through the outer-system before he’d worked out he had nothing with which to alter its course. It spun past the asteroid belt of one planet, and brushed the moon of another—and then he shot through the upper stratosphere and gravity took hold.

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The Medusa's Starman is available as a stand-alone short story at the following links: books2read.com/u/mZwd6E.

You can also find Kristine Kathryn Rusch's latest free short story over on her blog: kriswrites.com. Why don't you go and check it out?