A Kiss for Damocles

The enemy is dead. Their guns still aim.

The Mutual Prosperity invaded Hesperides Colony centuries ago--dropped asteroids on the oceans, triggered a volcanic winter, killed millions. The invaders eventually died fighting. Their orbital artillery AI, Damocles, did not. It has spent three hundred years killing anything that looks like a threat: radio signals, powered vehicles, anything that might let humanity rebuild fast enough to strike back.

Seventeen-year-old Shaifennen "Shai" Roehe grew up in a mineshaft, scrounging salvage from the ruins of a dead civilization. Then she finds a crashed military shuttle from the Long Night buried in a highland ravine. It's the biggest salvage find in living memory--and it comes with secrets. Traitors from the original war. A murdered alien marine who died fighting for humanity's future. And enough battlesteel and fabrication equipment to turn her struggling homestead into something that scares the right people.

From there, Shai has to navigate a volatile trade mission to the nearest town, untangle a conspiracy that runs generations deep, survive assassination attempts, and figure out why every faction on Hesperides--the Riders, the Archive, the alien Imps, the new Trade Association that smells a lot like the old tyranny with better hair--seems to already know about a project she has only just stumbled into.

Shai's universe is one filled with fallen empires, implacable war machines, lost civilizations, hostile xenos, the occasional ancient unspeakable horror, and she's going to bring the ruckus to every corner of it.

A finalist for the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, A Kiss for Damocles is the first book in the Tales From the Long Night series. Post-apocalyptic science fiction with a ferocious protagonist, deep world-building, earned political stakes, and a genuine belief that humanity can take back what it lost - if it can stop fighting itself long enough to try.

I'm a retired Goth and somewhat disgruntled yet generally mild-mannered veteran of the Gulf War, with experience in molecular biology, social services, and way too much retail when younger.In a way, these stories were inevitable. I gamed excessively when younger and often had more fun creating new characters and filling out those tiny little character bio screens than playing. My fleetmates in the Star Trek Online guild "TOS Veterans" started up some RP stories and encouraged me to beef up my main toon's bio. What was intended to be maybe a few hundred words of character background turned into 25K of story/fanfic.Finally, I realized that I wasn't satisfied simply consuming stories or weaving my characters into other people's worlds. By which I mean that an Augment girl raised by Vulcans and a particularly maladjusted Andorian Redshirt jumped the wall and demanded their own, original story world. They're kind of pushy.I suppose that brings us to influences. I've got lots of them. Too many to really list, from H. Ryder Haggard and Mark Twain to Andre Norton and Harlan Ellison, to James H. Schmitz and J. Michael Straczynski, Lois McMaster Bujold to Jim Butcher... And everyone in between.