Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV)

by Joe Vasicek

  She turned away. When he gently put a hand on her arm, though, she didn’t shrug him off.

  “We all have things we aren’t proud of, Mara. But you’re not a lost cause—not yet. And no matter what you’ve done, I know that you aren’t a complete monster.”

  “How?”

  “Because you’re still true and loyal to your friends. No true friend can ever be totally evil.”

  His words gave her pause. Is that true? As hard as it was to forgive herself, she had to admit that they rang true. And if he was right, then there was hope for her yet. She would never be able to undo what she had done, but it didn’t have to define who she was.

  Aaron’s heartbeat flatlined as he went into hibernation. Phoebe adjusted a few switches on her console, and the cryotank began to clear.

  “The cryofreezing process is complete,” she announced. “Everything looks long-term stable. He’ll stay in exactly the same condition he is now until we thaw him.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Mara. “Withdraw the tank from the machine and put it into storage.”

  “Already on it, Captain.”

  As Phoebe went back to work, Mara turned back to Mathusael. He stared at the cryotank as if lost in thought, but when he realized that she was staring at him, he turned to her and smiled.

  “Do you remember how I told you that I could see you making a strong wife and mother someday?” he asked.

  “I do indeed.”

  “Well,” he continued, “it occurs to me that this ship is a family of sorts. We’re all responsible for each other, and we work together to achieve our best potential. So now that you’re in command, in a certain sense that makes you like a mother to us.”

  She cocked her head at him. “A family, you say?”

  “Not in the traditional sense, but the comparison still holds. And for that alone, I think your father would be proud.”

  His reassuring words made her smile. She took a long breath and stood a little straighter.

  “Well then, if this ship is my family now, I expect nothing but the best from them.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  “That goes for you too, Commander. Stars know we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  “Of course,” he said, grinning. “Nothing but the best for my friends.”

  Author’s Note

  Sometimes when you write a book, the story just comes to you, and the first draft comes out with everything where it needs to be and nothing missing that needs to be there. It might need a little editing just to clean things up and make the writing tighter, but the story itself is solid and hardly needs any work at all. Other times, the first draft comes out rather messy, and it takes a couple of iterations to even figure out what’s wrong with it, much less to fix it.

  Comrades in Hope was a lot more like the former. I wrote it in a white-hot creative heat over the course of just a month or so, and the final published book is more or less a polished up version of the first draft. But Comrades in Hope was also a straightforward adventure story, at the beginning of the series arc, so the character relationships were a lot less complex and there were a lot fewer plot threads to tie together. With Friends in Command, things were a lot more complicated.

  In a lot of ways, Friends in Command is a bridge story, weaving out the threads from the first few books and setting things up for the later ones. The thing about bridge stories, though, is that they’re really hard to pull off right. You can’t have too much of a payoff, otherwise the later books will feel too anticlimactic, but you don’t give enough payoff, then readers get bored or upset and drop the series. It’s a difficult balancing act, which is made even harder if you’re trying to write a complete, self-contained story that is also part of a larger whole.

  In my opinion, one of the best bridge stories ever written was Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back. Not only does it set things up magnificently for the ultimate payoff in Return of the Jedi, but it gives the main hero a character arc and punctuates that arc with some jaw-dropping reveals. Instead of following out the arc to its conclusion, it cuts when the hero hits his ultimate lowest point, allowing the movie to stand on its own as a self-contained story. And because that story is essentially a tragedy, it provides enough contrast with the other two parts to add some serious depth and emotion to the whole series. For all of these reasons, The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite movie in the whole Star Wars franchise.

  I wanted to do something similar with Friends in Command, and to do that, I had to make it more about the characters. Since Brothers in Exile was mostly about Isaac, Comrades in Hope was mostly about Aaron, and Strangers in Flight was mostly about Reva, it only made sense that Friends in Command would be about Mara. When I wrote the first draft, though, I made it all from her point of view. That proved to be a mistake, because in certain parts of the story, she’s not the most interesting person to follow. When I tried to adjust things so that that wasn’t the case, it led to plot holes and other nonsense. The story was all there, and I knew what had to happen, but it wasn’t coming together the way it needed to.

  Right in the middle of writing Friends in Command, I broke up with my girlfriend of six or seven months. It wasn’t a particularly messy breakup, but these sorts of things are almost never pleasant. I had also moved apartments to the other side of Provo, which ended up being a good move, but it turned life upside down for a little while. At some point, I think I just wanted to power through the book and get it done with.

  When I got back the comments from my first readers, the feedback was mixed. There was a lot about it that they liked, but other things that didn’t seem to work. I could also tell that there were things they weren’t telling me, either because they weren’t exactly sure what was wrong, or they didn’t know how to come out and say it. I had a choice to make: I could either put out Friends in Command on schedule, setting it up to release over Christmas, or I could push back the publication date and fix what was wrong. In other words, I could publish something that was good enough but probably flawed, or I could try to make it better.

  I decided to push back the publication date and make sure the book was as good as I could make it. But instead of diving back into it, though, I took a break to work on some other unfinished projects in order to approach it with fresh eyes. When I came back, I saw the problem quite clearly: I was missing a vital viewpoint character. That character was clearly Aaron, so I went back and added him in.

  It didn’t take very long to write the second draft, and I had high hopes that this would be the final version. Just to be safe, though, I sent it through another round of test readers (different from the first ones) and waited for their feedback. They told me that something was missing—that it felt too much like a bridge, and not a complete story in itself. I realized that the second draft had fixed most of the plot problems but left out the focus on the characters, which was what I really needed for the whole thing to come together.

  So I reluctantly went back to do another revision, this time for consistency with the characters, particularly Mara and Mathusael. Where before I’d focused mostly on how she was haunted by the killing of the Imperial officers, this time I focused on the life that she’d been wrenched from, and how she still held on to a vestige of it. Since Mathusael came from the same cultural background, it was natural that this tension would come out in their relationship with each other.

  The culture of the Deltans is a lot like the culture of the place where I currently live. Here in Utah, people tend to be conservative, religious, and place a lot of emphasis on families. There’s certainly a lot of pressure for single people like me to get married, and I think that’s reflected in some ways with Mara. When writing her character, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be torn out of that set of cultural expectations by war.

  Out of all the characters in the Sons of the Starfarers series, Mathusael is probably the one who is most like me. It’s actually a toss-up between him and Isaac, but regardle
ss, I really enjoyed writing him into it. I wasn’t originally planning to, but when I hit a block in the first draft, it seemed natural to throw him in. In fact, throwing him in was what allowed me to power through and write the book. I will definitely throw him into a later book as a point of view character.

  If you’ve been waiting for Friends in Command for the last nine months or so, I apologize. Hopefully, the finished product was worth the wait. And while I can’t yet say exactly when Captives in Obscurity is going to come out, I can say definitively that Sons of the Starfarers will not go longer than nine books. Each book that comes out has been longer than the last one, so the last few books may be mid- to long-sized novels, but there will only be nine of them—that I can promise. And for those of you who are interested in my other books, they will tie in with my Gaia Nova novels in ways that you might find interesting. So definitely keep an eye out for that!

  I hope you enjoyed Friends in Command! If you did, I hope you’ll consider posting a review of it so that others can find and enjoy it too. If you’d like to keep up with my books, you can sign up for my mailing list on my blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs (onelowerlight.com/writing). That’s also the best place to follow me online, since I post updates fairly regularly. I’m also on Twitter, Wattpad, and Goodreads. I used to be on Facebook, but I got off for a variety of reasons, mostly due to privacy concerns. The best way to make sure you don’t miss any of my books is to sign up for my mailing list or to follow my blog.

  Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!

  Acknowledgments

  There are so many people to thank with their help with this book that it’s hard to keep track of them all! First, I’d like to thank all of my first readers, many of whom agreed to help out on short notice: Amber Carlson, Benjamin Keeley, Logan Kearsley, Erin Kearsley, and Mykle Law. Thanks also to Scott Bascom and Ailsa Lillywhite for helping me to bounce off ideas that would later be incorporated into the book. I also owe a thank you to Kalen O’Donnell for the cover design and Josh Leavitt for the editing. Thanks so much guys! Because of your help, I now have another book that I can be proud of.

  ON THE EDGE OF KNOWN SPACE, THERE IS NOWHERE TO ESCAPE.

  The deadliest pirates in the galaxy have stolen the technology that will transform it. After betraying the Outworld Confederacy and seizing the most powerful battleship in the fleet, they are now poised to set up an empire of their own.

  Isaac and Reva know that they are running out of time. When the pirates holding them captive reach the Far Outworlds, there will be nowhere for them to run. But Gulchina, the madwoman in charge, seems to be grooming Reva as an heir. And in the outer reaches beyond known space, a planet holds a secret that will change their lives forever in

  SONS OF THE STARFARERS

  BOOK V: CAPTIVES IN OBSCURITY