Title: Labyrinth of Stone
Author: TA Moore
Publisher: Torquere Press
Length: 41K
Genre: Science Fiction, Gay Romance
Two-line Blurb: Between being abducted by aliens and forced to become a soldier on a strange, broken world, Jeremy Teller has had enough upheaval in his life. So why, when Nathan Kearney, his commanding officer, tells him to either find his runaway lover or take his place in Kearney’s bed, does his sexuality throw up a Magic 8-Ball answer of ‘Maybe’?
Blurb: 10 years ago the Black Rapture transported thousands of people, seemingly at random, from Earth to the strange, inimical world they call the Labyrinth. Will Teller was one of them. Surviving that meant joining an army and becoming better at killing than he’s comfortable with. It’s enough upheaval for anyone’s life. The only problem is, apparently no-one told his commanding officer that.
Pride, and heart, stung by abandonment, the icily controlled General Nathan Kearney has decided that Teller can either find the wayward lover, or he can take his place in Nathan’s bed. That’s pretty good motivation for a straight guy, only thing is – Teller’s sexuality seems to have gone a bit Magic-8 Ball on that issue. Suddenly Nathan’s starting to look pretty good, and the only question is whether or not Teller wants to be the consolation prize?
Of everything they’d lost in the Black Rapture, Teller thought he’d missed pizza the most. It hadn’t exactly been on top of anyone’s priorities after they’d woken up here, under the stone skies of the labyrinth. People had counted themselves lucky if they’d been able to scrape together enough cat and rat to fill their family’s bellies. They’d counted themselves lucky to have families still alive to feed.
Ten years on, and now you could walk down the Corridor unmolested and buy yourself a slice of pizza from Papa Stromboli’s hole in the wall.
It was tomatoey civilization on a slice of baked dough. Thank God whatever had dropped them here had the good grace to grab some tomato plants on the way through.
You’d think people would be grateful. They never were. Least of all Stromboli. Teller was pretty sure the old man spat in the sauce whenever he had to serve one of the sentries. Not that it stopped Teller. He didn’t care if Stromboli swabbed the sweat from under his arms with the pastrami. It was the principle of the thing.
He sat on a low stone wall outside the stall, eating his second slice of extra garlic pizza and contemplating a third. It wasn’t that he was particularly hungry, but it was an excuse not to head back to the Keep. Not a good excuse, though – or at least he was pretty sure that it wasn’t one General Kearney was going to buy.
What the hell. Teller shoved himself to his feet, brushing the dust off the ass of his trousers. Stromboli scowled at him when he headed back to the roughly carved window.
“You’re scaring off my other customers,” he griped sourly. Heat flushed his round, wrinkled face ruddy, color striped over his heavy cheeks and squashed, bulldog nose. It made the scar that ran from the corner of his mouth up into his ear look pale, a welt of rough, white skin. “The sentries upset people’s digestions.”
“Yet I’ve never seen anyone turn down our business,” Teller said dryly, tossing a clipped, stamped chit onto the scarred granite shelf. “Another slice.”
Stromboli grabbed the coin, sticking it into his belt, and spat out of his kitchen. The gob of spit hit the ground and strips of gray moss came crawling from the walls, groping for the smudge of moisture with long, fine cilia. They preferred blood, but anything wet would do.
“I’ll start you a tab,” Stromboli said, nodding over Teller’s shoulder.
He looked around. A rangy, bay mare trotted over the cobbles, glossy black brougham rattling along behind it. People scattered out of the way, urged on by the crack of the driver’s whip. Easy to tell the innocent from the guilty of something by the ones who pressed themselves to the walls and the ones that disappeared into the cracks, darting for the backways.
It pulled up at the side of the road. the door cracked open and Sol Porter got out, pausing to adjust the fit of his jerkin and the pinch of the collar at his neck.
Teller turned back to Stromboli. “I’ll take that to go,” he said. Cracking a smile he added, “Chuck on some extra garlic?”
Suspension was still a technology in re-development. Teller slouched back on his barely cushioned bench, the jolt of wheels on cobbles jarring his tail bone. When he shifted, his boots kicked the hook set in the middle of the floor. It was meant to anchor shackles. Maybe, Teller mused, he’d irritated the good general more than he’d planned.
“Idiot,” Sol snapped, his mouth tight in the frame of his patchy, close-clipped beard. “You knew Kearney would want to see you.”
TEASE
Ben Colt – Extract Three
Later on, he’d tell anyone that asked that the dead had been the lucky ones. No one ever believed him.
It felt wrong. All of it. The first class seats, the dish of warmed peanuts, the heavy glass of expensive whiskey. After eight months in Afghanistan he was used to bed rolls, crappy food eaten out of tins and whatever rotgut filled a flask. And red sand – in his boots, in his pits, in his mouth, every-buggering-where.
Once they landed, it would be another world again. Trailers, his fat, angry mom and platefuls of supermarket funeral food. Recriminations, dirty looks and people muttering about him behind their hands in corners. At least until the booze kicked in, then they’d say it to his face and he’d punch their faces in.
It wouldn’t be a Colt family funeral without a punch-up.
So the butter pat in the shape of a flower and rare filet mignon was just…wrong. It made his head ache.
‘Quit worrying,’ Nathan said. He was sprawled out in the seat next to him, eyes closed and feet up. ‘She ain’t gonna make a scene at the old man’s funeral.’
Ben grunted and tossed back the dregs of his whiskey, crunching oddly shaped ice slivers between his teeth. ‘Why not? The old man would if he could.’
That made Nathan open his eyes, mouth making that shape. The apology shape, the ‘sorry I fucked up, fucked you, told your old man to fuck off’ shape. It made Ben scowl. He wasn’t…out. He wasn’t going to be joining a Pride parade or asking Nathan to marry him on the Jumbotron or whatever.
Colts started fist fights at funerals, in bars, with bikers. They were mean drunks and good soldiers and fucking awful dads. They didn’t suck cock, and they certainly didn’t shack up with another guy.
Love. OK. They didn’t fall in love with another guy. Even if they had known that guy since they were thirteen. Hell, the only thing the old man had ever got sentimental over was his that junkyard mean old dog of his.
‘Look, would it be easier if I-’
‘Fuck off,’ Ben growled, slouching down in his seat. ‘If I have to go, so do you.’
He wasn’t his Dad. Being gay was weird as fuck, and sometimes he still felt guilty for not being what everyone else wanted, but it was right. The guilt slid off Nathan’s face, the corner of his mouth quirking in a smirk. ‘Yeah, well, if your mad cousin tries to convert me again? I’m out of there.’
‘To that snake-bothering cult of hers, or pussy?’
‘Both. Either.’
Ben snorted, and waved the attendant over to order a beer. It was a funeral after all, you turned up buzzed not blackout. He sucked the foam off the top and then Nathan leaned in over the arm rest.
‘Hell, even if I was straight,’ he said, voice low and confiding. ‘I’d be scared of finding a snake up there.’
Ben laughed and choked on his beer, wheezing out chuckles as Nathan whacked him on the back. The first pitch of the plane, he thought was just turbulence.
‘Shit,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Like your family is any-’
The plane…flinched, jolting sideways like a scared horse. Ben heard the old man’s voice in his head, ‘Two for flinchin’, boy’, and braced himself. It was stupid, he realized, but the plane was slapped sideways before he could relax. Nathan grunted and lurched sideways, the loosely fastened belt digging into his stomach. A few seats down, a man was flung out of his chair. He cracked heads with the woman sitting opposite, the noise the loud, final-sounding crack of a drink-driving commercial. The attendants were hanging on to seats and maybe that was why they wore so much foundation, because Ben was pretty sure they’d blanched under that layer of orange tan.
‘What the hell…’ Nathan muttered. He thumped Ben’s shoulder and nodded out the scratchy oblong window. ‘Look.’
There was a wall. Close enough to the wing to make Ben flinch. Thirty-thousand feet up, and there was a wall.
As a small child TA Moore genuinely believed that she was a Cabbage Patch Kid and no-one had told her. This was the start of a lifelong attachment to the weird and fantastic. These days she lives in Northern Ireland with an unimpressed cat and her friends have a rule that she can only send them three weird and disturbing links a day (she still holds that a DIY penis bifurcation guide is interesting, not disturbing).
TA Moore believes that adding ‘in space’ to anything makes it at least 40% cooler, will try to pet pretty much any dog she meets and once lied to her friend that she had climbed all the way up to Tintagel, when actually she’d only gotten to the beach and chickened out. She writes about vampires, werewolves and ghosts (*whispers* ‘in space!) and once wrote zombie erotica to prove it could be done.
The author can be found at:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TA.Moores?fref=ts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tammy_moore
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