The Princess & The Gangsters should be out next month.

Taroniah at Bay is progressing.

Our new house is nearing completion requiring us to visit repeatedly (2 1/2 hours each way) so that is interrupting things and then the move is approaching – next month sometime I expect. Could be off the internet for some days which will hold things up.

Kyron the Rescuer follows Taroniah and then the New Federation Story The Kelad Onslaught.

Peter

Going on how up his window the glare was coming, the sun was well up by the time he finally woke up in the morning, yet he still felt exhausted from the mental gyrations of the day before. It took him some time and two cups of coffee before he was able to get his head working, and then he pulled open the laptop and started in on the files again. At some point, he listened to the recording he had on his phone of Urasmian casting the transport spell into the wooden broom handle the sorcerer had made into a wand or staff or something. He found a couple of words on the tablets that he was sure had also been used in the spell, and these gave him a better grasp of the pronunciation of the rest of the words. He quickly found that the more he compared the two groups of tablets and attempted to decipher the Linear A text, the easier it became.

He finally broke off studying just after one, absolutely famished and made a sandwich, at which point he suddenly remembered that today was the day he was supposed to pick up the parents from the airport. Shit! What time was their flight arriving? He had absolutely no recollection! He ran around doing a headless chook impersonation for a couple of minutes, checking the calendar on the fridge, the calendar on his phone, and the note file for odd stuff he kept on his phone, getting more frantic by the minute before remembering he had stored the details on his computer! Frantic mouse pointer stuff! Relief. Not till after five. Ha!

He refrained from returning to the Linear A study just in case he got too distracted, so he sat and watched a couple of re-runs of Time Team episodes before leaving fairly early for the airport, where he got a good parking place and waited patiently in the terminal near the exit gate until their plane arrived. He spotted them easily in the middle of the main press of passengers, and they soon spotted him in turn. Much parental joy followed, along with interrogation as to the state of the house as they collected their baggage and then headed home. No, he hadn’t held any wild parties. Sheesh. Even if he wanted to, he doubted he had enough friends to hold a tame party, let alone a wild one! All traces of Urasmian had been removed except the aluminum ends on the broom pole, which casting the transport spell had sort of welded in place, he had discovered. He had to admit that it made for an interesting effect, although he kept the matter to himself. If they asked about the pole, he’d say he had been working on a prop for an outfit to wear to a Con later in the year.

His folks had the rest of the week off, not having to return to their respective jobs till the following Monday, and he quickly found that having them around the house was too distracting for serious study, so he headed into college mid-morning the next day. The drive there was frustrating as it was pouring with rain which slowed all the traffic down. Why do people drive so much slower in the wet? Around corners and such, yeah, he could understand being careful, but on the main road in a straight line when the road was merely wet, not submerged? It sure was frustrating how cautious and slow many people became in the wet. And then there were the idiots that still sped and drove like maniacs. Fortunately, there were relatively few of those idiots out today. He finally reached the campus car park nearest his building and then had to hustle through the University grounds in the rain, eventually reaching the office or the study in a slightly damp state. After unloading his laptop from the plastic bag he grabbed in the garage to carry it in to keep the rain out, he settled down to work.

The way Urasmian pronounced the word Keftios meant it did sound sort of a bit like he was using ancient Greek, but it was much more guttural than Greek usually sounded. Ah, he thought, as he determined that that line meant five female goats and a male goat. Or so it appeared. The last line referred to five cups or pots of the type most authorities called tripods and six of another kind of cup, which was usually regarded as the name for the three-handed cups. The first line was obviously the person’s name who owned all these things. Urasmian’s Hellandios was indeed more like Mycenean Greek than Classical Greek, he decided. A bit like French is far more like Latin than it is the Germanic the Franks must have spoken originally. Clearly, history had run to a different path on Earth Fifty East, as he had started to call the planet Urasmian came from.

He stayed buried in his computer, studying the tablets, and he was only vaguely aware of the others leaving as the afternoon wore on. He began comparing the other tablets and looking for matching words or word groups and found more as the day turned into evening. Ah, this man had two chariots and five chariot wheels. He must have been a warrior. And six amphorae of wine. He began trying to pronounce the Linear A text using the Mycenean sounds for the symbols that matched but saying them in a much more guttural way. It sounded almost like the Keftios Urasmian had used for the transport spell. Almost. He could feel and see the Linear A language just there, sort of hanging in front of him but could still not quite grasp it. Damn!

Instead, a tap on his shoulder made him jump in fear and surprise, and he finished up on the floor as his chair overbalanced, leaving him looking up at an extremely apologetic security guard.

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to startle you that much.” The fellow said, offering Jason a hand to help Jason scramble back up off the floor.

“Um. Yes. That’s all right. I was miles away.” His heart was still going at seemingly twice its normal rate!

“I could see that, sir. I spoke to you three times before touching you. It’s lockup time, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

Jason looked around at the empty room and settled himself inwardly. “Huh?” Not the most intelligent sounding of responses. It must be nine o’clock already! What the…  He shook his head, trying to focus on the idea that it was nine o’clock already. “Oh. Sorry. Yes, of course. I’ll pack up straight away. Sorry.”

The guard smiled. “No problem, sir. I’ll just go check on the far end of the hall and lock up as I return. If that is all right?”

“Yes, yes. No problem. Sorry to hold you up. I’ll be out of here in a sec.”

He sat down after righting his chair, saved his image files before shutting down the laptop, and was gone before the guard returned. Damn! He thought to himself as he waited at the lift. He’d never become so immersed in anything that he could have that much time pass without realizing what was happening! By the time he exited the lift two floors below, his stomach was making sure he noticed that he had missed dinner! Ah, Mcdonalds! The best friend of students who study late.

He had often thought about asking the rather attractive French girl out and would have if it hadn’t been for her on-again, off-again sometime relationship with Dylan, whom Jason had never met. It appeared their relationship had turned serious. Not that he was ever likely to have persuaded her to go out with him even if she had been single. None of the other girls he’d asked out since beginning here at College had been interested enough to consider even a first date. At least the couple of girls he’d met through the online dating service he was on had at least gone on one date with him. Besides, he did not have enough time for a girlfriend. Really, he didn’t.

Chapter 5

Change in approach

Back at his desk, he quickly finished translating the other Linear B tablets, then spent a couple of hours checking his translation against the only extant published one of the lower group of tablets. He found a few differences between his translation and the published one, which wasn’t surprising given the vagaries of deciphering a three-thousand-year-old language. On re-checking the tablets, he decided that his interpretation of the text was correct in every case. There was nothing specific to base this on, but his conversations with Urasmian had given him a feel for Hellandios, which he thought was very similar to Mycenean. That ease of use and the understanding of what Urasmian was saying seemed to have carried over into reading the Mycenean tablets. He suspected that if he saw written Hellandios, it would also look like Mycenean. By the time he was finished, the afternoon was nearly over. He thought about heading home but then decided to have a coffee break and come back and look at the Linear A tablets before heading home for a late dinner.

Studying the Linear A tablets was strange after the Linear B ones, as they were so similar in appearance, although the Linear A ones were messier. He wondered if the letters had similar phonetics to the Mycenean ones and began sounding them out while comparing the two groups on the screen, two by two and two tablets deep, scrolling up and down. There was something about them, the sounds as he mouthed them, the shape of the text blocks. He paused and moved the images into a proper graphics program. He arranged the images of the tablets, so they were displayed side by side and by the shape of the text blocks, re-arranging the order and fiddling until he was happy. And he could almost make sense of them. Almost. Hmmm.

Then he noticed that Linear A Tablet four had a two-word block that seemed to match Linear B Tablet six. He re-arranged them again and compared these two. One cow was the Linear B two-word sentence. So, if that symbol was one and that was a cow, did those symbol combinations appear on any other Linear A tablets? And if the two tablets were recording the same information, what else could he decipher? While puzzling over the characters, he started running the spell Urasmian had used to travel home through his head. He had worked out that Keftu most likely referred to Crete, especially as it was similar to the Egyptian word for the island. With Keftios being both the name for the island’s people and the term for the language they spoke.

Is now available

Six hundred years ago, a nuclear war devastated the planet, particularly the northern hemisphere. The war started over gene modifications that gave some humans special powers. Areas of the southern hemisphere are now slowly recovering, and civilization has begun to rebound.

Ostraya, being the least damaged of the southern hemisphere areas, is also the most advanced along that road to recovery, but its population density is still far lower than it had been before the nuclear war. After centuries of poor treatment, those Ostrayans who inherited the gene modifications are finally starting to be accepted by mainstream society.

Then, Ostraya is invaded by the brutal, totalitarian forces from the Japanese part of the Triple Alliance that extends across thousands of worlds. The Japanese enforce their rule through the use of chips they place in people’s heads. These are attached to metal tendrils that spread throughout the brain of the person, allowing the gene-modified mentalists of the Alliance to control them. This is the story of that invasion.