Asteropia
Book 2 of the Lunar Series
by
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CHAPTER 8
NIN’THOOSA’S SUITE WITHIN SPACE STATION AL-MOSSADEGH; THE NEXT DAY
Nin’thoosa found herself on the floor, next to her bed, with her covers tangled up around her. The lights in her suite had winked off and never came back on. She groggily looked up from her bed and saw, thanks to the Martian light coming through her window, that her whole guestroom was in turmoil! It looked as though an erthquake had struck the resort station—but of course that was, quite literally, impossible. They were about three hundred miles above the Martian surface!
Nin’thoosa could feel the space station yaw and then tried to reconstitute its projected orbital course. Then she heard the screams outside her suite…
In her pajamas, Nin’thoosa ran out of her suite and into the hallway to find a stream of station workers and passengers running down a main hallway. Some of the other nearby passengers in Nin’thoosa’s section were also in their robes or pajamas looking around the station, confused by the spectacle.
“This is al-Mossadegh Security,” a synthetic male’s voice boomed over the communications link of the station. It had the accent of a Middle Eastern person, which, of course, reflected the owner and the people that operated the cosmological hotel. “It is vital that all passengers and employees of the station find your nearest escape pods and evacuate the station! This is not a drill! Again, this is al-Mossadegh Security…”
The message repeated itself, never stopping over the screams and shouts of the passengers and the station workers. Nin’thoosa wasn’t sure if she were still sleeping and all the commotion were some kind of nightmare, until security personnel came running up the hallway and grabbed the passengers that were standing there; confused, like Nin’thoosa.
“Officer, what’s going on,” one of the other passengers demanded as the small group in the hall were being ushered toward the same larger hallway with all the people stampeding in the same direction.
“There’s been a bomb,” one of the buffed young men shouted as they all ran toward the arterial corridor.
Now panic was in Nin’thoosa’s small group. Nin’thoosa was not immune to terror.
“What!”
“Wait! I still have my money in my suite!”
“How did this happen?”
“Where’s my son?”
“Go, go,” the other guard ordered them as the group now reached the stream of frightened Humans. “Keep following the other passengers…don’t trip; you might get killed in the crush!”
And the two guards were gone behind the wall of people that had now carried Nin’thoosa down the hallway toward a ward of escape pods. The vehicles themselves were recessed into the curving wall. When the entire station had gone on emergency mode, it automatically opened the escape pods’ entryway where the passengers and the workers could easily leap in.
Each pod had the capacity to fit around 20 people. But given that al-Mossadegh was a space station the size of a skyscraper where there were thirty-thousand people within it on any given day, it was a logistical nightmare to move that many people to the evacuation wards that dotted the station.
Nin’thoosa was about ten feet away waiting to get into one of the pods within a crowd when the station
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About the Book
Nin’thoosa (Ninna) is an ethnic Tellmondonian in the early-22nd century. Tellmondonians are Human descendants of a large group of lunar settlers from the late-20th century of Erth’s Moon.
Given her moderate political stance and connectedness within Tellmondo's political scene, Ninna is recruited by an agent of the super-conglomerate, international body called the Erth Industrial
Despite her juggles of espionage between Erth and Mars, Ninna still has to focus her main efforts against a prominent Tellmondonian official: Respect PunJon. The Respect is of a new generation of Tellmondonian nationalism and endeavors to re-establish the city-state of Tellmondo among the Sol system's asteroid belt. But the young Respect does this at the expense of Human lives and economic corruption!
Ninna finds herself in a world of cloak and dagger, mixed in with a solar system-wide intrigue that snarls trusted friends and even her heart...
Asteropia is a different Sci-Fi adventure. It is a mixture of sublime scientific and technological speculation, political intrigue, and street-smart Mafia-style plots.
About the Author
Joseth Moore is the author of Lunar Legends, The Solar Bridge: The Unintended Consequences of Time Travel, and There’s NO Place Like Zone. Joseth earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the
He produced and exhibited his modern art in
Joseth has been active within the American political Progressive movement, having been a member of organizations such as Nebraskans For Peace (for which he was a delegate in Washington, D.C. in 2002, as he lobbied against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste proposal), Friends of Wilderness Park, Amnesty International--Lincoln, NAPE-AFSCME (a union for state workers), the Lancaster County Democratic Party (which he was a voting member), the Peace Coalition of Lincoln, Ecology Now! of UNL, the Democratic Socialists of America, JUMETI (an organization for African-American affairs), ONE--Lincoln (the anti-poverty ngo started by Bono of U2) and most recently, the Lincoln Secular Humanists (for which Joseth serves as treasurer; and it was with this group that Joseth had met evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in Lawrence, Ks in 2006).
Joseth is the father of two daughters, Felisha Louise Moore and Gracie Mae Moore. Felisha is an animal-lover and plans to go to school for zoology when she is older and currently holds a White Belt in Taekwondo. Gracie is also an animal-lover and, much like her father, is very artistic and does craft projects for hours using gourds, found objects, and even Tupperware items.