Xanadu

"Xanadu" Quantum Series: Book 8

Action! Adventure! Totalitarianism!

Deanna - the spotted cow of the galaxy, was in big trouble.

Even the usual distractions of having a funny small moon that fell down occasionally, or a roving, aggressive grass species that could bite you off at the ankles, paled in comparison to current worldly affairs. This was serious.

With Earth's expected response to the fascist takeover now overdue and likely frustrated by Chancellor McMillen's cunning plan to raise a kind of energy field to isolate Deanna's system from the outside universe, he felt emboldened to remake Deanna in the image of a eugenic Aryan Utopia.

After their hands were tied by Terran policy for so many generations, the festering religious right wing finally had both hands free - and was working on its swing. Inconveniences like diversity and dissent were swept away at the stroke of his pen and clinically excised from Deannan society - banished to a windblown prairie in the Wilds between Atro City, San Fedora and Fortitude, the three largest cities on Deanna. Xanadu was a hell-hole where prisoners were held without food, water or shelter - and the only way out was rapid decline and death. This suited the architects of Xanadu - but it didn't suit Danielle Grauffis. 

Caught up in the D.S.L.'s net by pure chance - and outed as trans by a bystander, she'd been sent there to die. But first, she had time to watch those around her grow weaker and succumb to exposure, thirst and starvation - and even as she began to fade, she wasn't ready to give up yet. She'd do anything to hold out until rescue came. Anything.

Meanwhile in Atro City, Marla De Bris, Fred the Arborian and the vampire Resistance did their level best to make fascism a high-risk occupation for the D.S.L. - and, secreted away somewhere in the warehouse district, the craziest quantum physicist ever to live on Deanna was getting very close to delivering a bizarre new type of wunderwaffen to help the Loyalists win the war. Over in Skeggs Valley, after weeks of preparation and intensive retraining, the loyalist militia had finally struck camp and were on the move at last. 

Xanadu - and Chancellor McMillen's days, were numbered.