Science, truth, and conflict. When a womanās genetic heritage sends rival factions to war, can she claim her autonomy and save her people?
The distant future. Hella Nazariās heart aches. Heading to Earth after completing her cadet training on Titan, the twenty-one-year-old orphan has honed the piloting and combat skills needed to protect those she loves. But when a nuclear blast annihilates much of the planet, the devastated young soldier regains consciousness on a strange frozen world.
Struggling to survive the frigid tundra, she discovers a lone observatory only to realize its occupant is the terrorist behind the deadly attack. Her reality shifts when the eccentric scientist claims sheās the genetic clone of a long-dead religious icon, destined to serve as his pawn in eradicating more factions of the surviving population.
With a dark regime rising, can Hella escape to cross the galaxy and foil a catastrophic plot?
Sancta Femina is the thought-provoking first book in the science fiction series Legend of Asteria. If you like dauntless heroines, dark plots, and challenging concepts, then youāll love Kathryn Combsā double-edged tale.
Science, truth, and conflict. When a womanās genetic heritage sends rival factions to war, can she claim her autonomy and save her people?
The distant future. Hella Nazariās heart aches. Heading to Earth after completing her cadet training on Titan, the twenty-one-year-old orphan has honed the piloting and combat skills needed to protect those she loves. But when a nuclear blast annihilates much of the planet, the devastated young soldier regains consciousness on a strange frozen world.
Struggling to survive the frigid tundra, she discovers a lone observatory only to realize its occupant is the terrorist behind the deadly attack. Her reality shifts when the eccentric scientist claims sheās the genetic clone of a long-dead religious icon, destined to serve as his pawn in eradicating more factions of the surviving population.
With a dark regime rising, can Hella escape to cross the galaxy and foil a catastrophic plot?
Sancta Femina is the thought-provoking first book in the science fiction series Legend of Asteria. If you like dauntless heroines, dark plots, and challenging concepts, then youāll love Kathryn Combsā double-edged tale.
Darkness visible.
It was something Imani used to say when things got bad on the farm, back home on Earth in Cana. When the crops failed, when my stepfather became ill. But this is more than that, and I can hardly conceive of the truth of it. The truth that our home world is no moreāat least, not as Iād known it to be. A blue-and-green planet, and Cana, a lush, peaceful land where magic is God and God is magic. It was a haven protected, Iād thought, from this sort of impenetrable darkness.
āHella,ā she would say in the garden, āthis is to love in vain, as the morning glories do.ā She spread her hands wide as she spoke, looking down the hill and out over the spoiled land. I can still feel the parched earth under my bare feet, the dust between my toes, the morning sun in my eyes, and how my long hair felt heavy, braided tightly down my back. āThey bloom each morning only to die each evening, and so must we.ā Imani, a mother to me, loved the Earth, flowers, and everything green. āTheir ability to rise each morning and sleep each evening resembles human life.ā
In a way, she wasnāt wrong, but to rise again today is more than I can do. Because it is another thing entirely, to face the darkness without her.
Dust to dust, we come from nothing and return to nothing after death. Of this one thing I am certain, because nothing is all that remained after the bombs rained down on the great nations of Empyreus.
Homebound from Titan, our ship had entered Earthās orbit moments before an incendiary fireball ignited the sky below. From the safety of my forward cabin, I recall watching dumbfounded as our ship and the communications satellites surrounding the planet lost power in one synchronized zap. The damage was caused by an invisible wave of electromagnetic energy, an aftereffect of a nuclear explosion that renders electronics useless. Soon after, the half dozen space stations positioned in low Earth orbit detonated one by one in a glowing ring of brilliant energy.
Then it was our turn. With its primary power source compromised, our transport vessel could not mobilize fast enough to break free from the escalating chaos. We had no choice but to abandon ship, triggering escape protocols and ejecting our pods.
In transit, our one-man cryo-pods are powered by photovoltaic propulsion. Made of super-durable, lightweight materials, they travel the stars at around one-fifth the speed of light. Here in cryogenic suspension is where time stops and we become immortal. Our bodies are frozen to temperatures less than minus one hundred and thirty degrees Celsius. In this state, we do not breathe, we do not think, and we do not age. There is no living, but there is no dying either.
I do not know how long I traveled or how far. Perhaps it was a year, perhaps it was five hundred yearsāI cannot say. I turned up on a planet like Earth, tumbled out of the sky, and woke up under the stars.
The preprogrammed rescue course should have returned us to the closest baseāthe moon, Mars, or even back to Titanābut somehow, I have been rerouted to this foreign world. My mind shouldnāt have been awake for the journey, but my pod is damaged, and Iām having unsettling flashbacks that give me the haunting feeling that a far more significant amount of time has passed than Iām prepared to accept.
Cryogenic dreams are a subject of debate. Science canāt account for them, but people can. They are regarded to be in the same category as near-death experiences, the soul of a robot, and the existence of God. When the human body is in cryogenic suspension, by all measures of science, the brain is not considered to be alive. No electrical or biological activity can be detected, and the absence of brainwaves equates to the absence of dreamsāor at least, it should. But this is not the case for those of us who habitually engage in cryogenic space travel.
Stranded at the crash site on the planetās surface, I have no power. Ordinarily, the sun would charge my pod and suit, but Iāve landed on the dark side.
A dead suit and flat battery tell me I have been crashed here out of the reach of solar energy for more than a weekāten Earth days, at leastāleading to my suspicion that the planet is tidally locked, which, by definition, means an orbiting astronomical body always has the same face toward the object itās orbiting. The result is one hot side, fixed facing the sun, and a shadow side, which is likewise locked but facing away from the sun in the perpetual black of polar night.
This condition is not uncommon among planets. It could have happened to Earth, eventually, except our sun would have become a red giant first, swallowing the Earth and moon in the fiery finality of true apocalypse. But today as I wake, all that science and speculation is moot. Humanity beat our red giant to the punch, and the long nuclear night has begun its work to snuff out our civilization ahead of schedule.
The world outside is white, covered in snow and ice. It is dark, windy, and precipitating heavily. A few moments ago, my eyes fluttered open at the sound of the release of air. The smaller capsule nested inside my pod is set to decompress when the body temperature of the subject in stasis reaches normal levels. Upon its release, I awoke to find myself in utter darkness, successfully thawed. I managed to extract myself from the confinement of the coffin-like tube and suit up for the hostile environment awaiting me before manually cranking open the exit hatch at the foot of my pod.
Outside I found more darkness, save the muted illumination of starlight in a cloudy night sky. It was enough to see to pack up my podās standard-issue emergency kit before climbing out for a look around. The kit contains rations and a few mechanically powered instruments expected to be helpful in situations such as this.
As my vision adjusts to the deep night surrounding me, the first thing I notice is that there is no moon. Its absence suggests that Iāve not had the good fortune to have been returned to Earthāwishful thinking, I know. And the pull of gravity on my limbs is such that the moon, Titan, and any other familiar astronomical body in our solar system can be ruled out. What did that leave? Well, about one hundred billion other possibilities.
Searching the night sky, I look for clues in the starscape. But when I try to measure the line shifts, first with my scope and then by capturing a long exposure image, my earlier suspicions are confirmed. No observable line shifts and no star trails mean one thing: no rotation.
I must head east to the light side, but Iām having a hard time focusing on the task at hand and, in truth, am not doing much more than brooding. The word brooding hardly does justice to describe the enormity of loss I am feeling. What happened back on Earth is starting to take shape in my memory as a realityāand not just a bad dream I can shake off, a forgettable side effect of cryogenic space travel. Itās taking everything in me not to give in to the wave of panic rising from my gut. I keep making the mistake of thinking that I only need wait until morning and the sun will rise to help me find my way, but the sun will never rise here. It will not come to me, like it faithfully did every day of my youth on Earth. I must go to it. I wonāt pretend Iām not terrified of what could be out there but know I will die here if I donāt keep moving. If I can make it to the light side, the sun will power up my suit. And, with a little luck, I can then remotely charge my pod, recall it to me, and send out a distress signal.
Exiting the pod, I had glimpsed the silhouette of a vast mountain range, faintly limned against the horizon, at a distance of maybe six or seven miles. Setting out toward a white ridge, the snow-covered mountain face is glowing from reflected starlight that is now so bright, I can see my shadow. My boots crunch the packed snow as I walk, disrupting the perfection of the white blanketed ground stretching before me as far as I can see.
The lifelessness here makes for an eerie sort of quiet. I wonder, How many millions of years have passed in this place with not a soul to bear witness? Itās not silent and is most certainly not a peaceful quiet, but an absent, empty, maddening quiet broken only by the desperate sound of the constant, icy wind.
It feels better to walk and get my blood pumping, and as my head begins to clear, I try again to process what happened. But no matter how I look at it, I cannot find a way to feel hopeful or get distance from the profound sadness I feel about the attack on Earth.
Waking dreams of Cana fill my mind. Cana, my home country, is the Earth I knew in the early days of my youth and the world I was fighting to restore. There are so many things I used to care about that mean nothing now: people for whom I lived and a land for which I whole-heartedly believed Iād die.
Xavier is one of them. He seemed to understand me, but back then, I could never get around the blackness of his aura. Now I know that any lightness and innocence he might have once possessed had been extinguished by grief. Things he used to say were so abstract to me then, but now his words are all that ring clearly in my mind. The darkness I did not understand in him, I now recognize in myself. I want to go to him and tell him I understandāthat he is not alone in his pain. That we are the same. But it is too late. He is gone, and Earth as I have known it is gone. It is too late for most all things.
Before the war, we would ride for days in the countryside. We would bask in the glory of the sun, our youth, our freedom, and Iād say, āThis is forever.ā
His response was always the same: āCareful with forever.ā He would smile as he said it, but the light did not reach his eyes, and he would look away from me as he tightened the girth of my saddle.
Xavier was eighteen when I saw him last, and I was sixteen. He meant everything to me. His parents had died when he was very young. Living on the land next to ours, he cared for the horses and property they had left behind.
Could I know him better in death? My brothers Taj and Joshua accepted him as dead, but I refuse to. If heās not dead, he most certainly is gone. He left on a deep-space research mission to survey the Alpha Centauri system when I was still on Earth, and while the research base is only a quarter of the way to Alpha Centauriāpast Neptune, beyond the Kuiper belt in the outer fringes of the Oort cloudāhe would still be gone ten years.
Alpha Centauri is the closest planetary system to Earth, and it is where I fear I have landed now. My stomach turns as I grapple with what that reality would mean if true. While itās the closest system, it is more than four light years away from Earthās sun. Even with the miraculous technological advancement of the nuclear pulse engine, our best ships travel at only a fraction of the speed of light. If Iām right, twenty years passed during the time I was in stasis, and if Iām to return, it will mean another twenty years back.
I continue to walk toward the distant mountains, aware that the cold of the frozen surface is beginning to penetrate my boots. My thoughts return to Xavier.
Shortly after he reached the research base, all communications ended. He effectively disappeared to all who knew him. That was five years ago, meaning Iāve spent the last five years wondering where he is and how to find him. I take comfort in the knowledge that he was not on Earth the day Empyreus fell, but I cannot say the same for my family members who wereāImani, my brothers, and the rest of Cana.
Sancta Femina is a dark tale about science, truth and how one womanās genetic heritage leads to an all-out war.
After completing her cadet training on Titan, Hella Nazari is heading back to Earth when a nuclear blast annihilates much of the planet. Without her scheduled destination, the 21-year-old orphan regains consciousness in an unfamiliar territory.
Her immediate relief upon discovering a lone laboratory after barely surviving the new and frigid atmosphere quickly dissipates when she realizes it belongs to the monster who destroyed her planet. From bad to worse, Hella faces new worries when the scientist claims sheās the genetic clone of a long-dead religious figure. Hella is destined to serve as his pawn in eliminating survivors unless she makes a grand escape from a seemingly impossible situation.
Sancta Femina is not for the faint-hearted. It has a deeply intricate storyline that revolves around dark plots and challenging concepts. With a fearless heroine heading the tale, this story will captivate readers from page one. The first part of the story provides an in-depth background on the catastrophe that has taken place and the reasoning. It provides the necessary details to connect with the main character and understand her actions and emotionsāa great setup to keep the reader hooked and wanting more. In the first half, the characters are some of the strongest elements of this story. Not only is it easy to connect with the main character, but the side characters are also interesting and dealing with complex challenges themselves, making the story compelling. A special mention to Ramses, a robotic companion who will win over anybodyās heart within an instant.
Following the setup of the story and the excitement of Hellaās challenging situation, there was a section of the story that felt like it was dragging on. Thereās a lot of action and explanation in the first bit, which makes a bit of the second part feel underwhelming. As the story progresses, thereās still much to learn, including jaw-dropping information. However, it felt a bit slow. As the story ends, thereās some expectation of a dramatic ending, but there wasnāt much to hook the reader fully. However, the ending does have its excitement and brings about a craving for the next book.
This extraordinary science fiction story had a central conflict, complications, climactic events and a resolution. This is a recommended read for all those who love an in-depth science fiction story.