Writing Challenges

[starshipcat]

There's a new vignette challenge over at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Grissom Timeline, as Lisa Fox has to maintain her cover in the face of appalling ignorance of a subject she knows intimately.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge on her Dreamwidth blog. My effort is from the Chaffee Artilect 'verse, as Sierra is about to be punishedThere's

Comments

[whswhs]

So were the humans using nonlethal weapons against the Haherei, in what amounts to an area denial attack? Or were some or many Haherei killed during the attempted raid? Is this a case of "Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun and they have not"?

[starshipcat]

Actually this is much earlier in the 'verse than human First Contact - the Haherei are already a well-established sepoy species by then, as is remarked upon by the protagonist in one of my works in progress.

I'm thinking they encountered something more on the order of an electric fence - an automatic system intended to keep domestic animals in and predators out. And almost certainly including some equivalent to surveillance cameras, so the Chongu know it wasn't a random incursion by the local equivalent of wolves, but a raid by sophonts at a nomadic hunter/herder level of culture.

[whswhs]

Ah. Well, I suppose an electric fence is a kind of area denial, just not a wireless one . . .