Mostly, I got the book rewired so that the sequence of events are in the right order (I did do about five hundred words). Now I’ll write bridges in key places in the narrative, smush it all together, then go through GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND again to see what I’ve missed. Gonna kill me some secondary characters! Alas, it has to be done. I mean, it’s a science fiction horror novel, right? Somebody’s got to die.
A snippet below the fold.
The flight back wasn’t anything much, for the first twenty minutes. I decided I wasn’t playing any games with the planetary network today. We were all better off just going ahead, and giving us all some time to process what we had seen. Twenty-one minutes in, I turned on the radio, since we were coming within range of what passed for a human communications network on One-Eighteen.
Twenty-two minutes in, the Anticipant gasped.
Even I could tell that wasn’t good, and a look at her face confirmed it. She was in full ‘white-eyed horror’ mode, only her suit wasn’t pulling her out of the state automatically. “Oft,” I carefully did not yell, “she’s gone fay!”
Oft had already detached himself from his seat; he moved to intercept her. “It’s not Fear Reflex Syndrome,” he told me over one shoulder as he grabbed her shaking hands. That seemed to calm her down, so maybe it wasn’t FeRe; people in the middle of one of those episodes hate being touched. “She’s just had some horrible news.”
That threw me for a loop. “From… where?” I gestured around the cabin. “There’s no news here to hear!”
“Except the radio.”
“It’s barely above static.”
“Not to her, Pam.” Oft shrugged, not letting go of the Anticipant’s hands. “Before you ask: I don’t know what she heard, either.” His face fell. “All I know is, it’s something personally traumatic.”
Which did not sound good.