Palorin’s Children

The alarm pulled him out of sleep.

CODE RED: PROXIMITY ALERT — UNIDENTIFIED VESSEL — COLLISION COURSE.

The ship’s voice cut through the dark flat and absolute, no urgency in the tone because urgency had been engineered out of it, replaced with something worse. Certainty. Nine months of running had wired something into Joas that responded before his mind caught up with what was happening, the body moving through the dark with the automatic economy of someone for whom the gap between waking and action had been drilled to nothing. His hand found the energy pistol from the holster mounted beside his bunk. The well-worn black leather topcoat, folded on the shelf at the bunk’s head the same way it was folded every night, settled across his shoulders in one motion. By the time the second klaxon cycle completed he was moving.

Some people are born with their eyes already pointed at the horizon. JT Caine is one of them, the kind who writes the science fiction he has always wanted to find: vast in scope, grounded in loss, and driven by the oldest human question: what lies beyond the edge of everything we know?

He lives in Canada. Palorin’s Children is his debut novel.