Xanadu Collision
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About this ebook
Sierra is charged with managing the closure of a cryogenics center - a place where dead people are suspended in the hope that a future civilization will revive them.
Only Sierra is part of that future civilization, and technology hasn't progressed enough.
She goes about her grim task with impassiveness until she stumbles across an intriguing file, and makes the fatal mistake of reading the contents. It doesn't take long before she's seduced by the romance of yesteryear.
Nicholas Sheffield
Nicholas Sheffield grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand. He obtained a Bachelor of Management Studies from the University of Waikato, and has a long history of work in the Information Systems sector. He and his wife Simone have six children. Double Dragon published his first work, Overlanders, in 2004. The novel revolves around a group of friends whose utopian existence is put at risk when they’re thrust into the archaic and dangerous cities of the overlands. Sheffield’s writings are generally set in, or around, the Earth, and employ a plausible use of technology. Therefore many of the popular science fiction themes, such as time travel and alternative dimensions, never appear in his works. The concepts that form the spine of each story are often as important as the main narrative. They’re not always held up to the spotlight, but tend to be woven quietly into the background.
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Xanadu Collision - Nicholas Sheffield
Xanadu Collision
Published by Nicholas Sheffield at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Nicholas Sheffield
The heather shrubs were in full bloom. A summer breeze was fluttering the dense clusters of urn shaped pink-purple flowers that clung delicately to their woody twigs. The invisible gusts traversed the flat countryside, pushing through the plants in great rippling swathes. Blue sky was everywhere. It shone down from above, saturating the colours and accentuating the wind’s shadow.
From the top branches of a distant woodlot, where the green leaves were thickest, a Montagu’s Harrier suddenly took flight. It launched onto an air current and then spread itself wide to float over the land. The grey wings, with their distinctive black wingtips, scarcely moved.
The buoyant flight took the bird over a comely chalk-coloured pathway, which wound its way through the heather habitat. The creature turned abruptly in a sharp arc, flattened out again, and soared gracefully over a great expanse of heather, heath, and gorse.
It was on the hunt. Its eyebrow ridge was fixed in a scowl and its beady black eyes flickered in a frantic, impatient search for prey. However, this time its swoop didn’t bear fruit. So, with a couple of quick wing beats, the Montagu’s Harrier rose up into the green foliage of another woodlot and disappeared.
This was summer. The year was 2363.
The tracts of nature reserves hadn’t changed much over the centuries. Other aspects of life had changed remarkably – with all the head spinning technology that pervaded human life - but this place was way off the pace. It had hardly evolved since medieval times.
Sierra had been watching the creature’s flight from afar. She wasn’t admiring it; just watching. Right now her mind was on other things.
She was sitting behind a desk on the second floor of a lonely country house. Her back was straight, her jaw level, and her hands were placed gently and purposefully on the desk. There was no emotion in her eyes. She was a professional woman in her thirties, but had the angular face and trendy, short-cropped haircut of a fresh graduate.
The working room around her was nicely appointed, but had an old world touch that was a long way behind its time. The desk she sat behind was big and curved, wrapping around two sides of the room, with a lacquered walnut top whose gold-brown scrawls radiated warmth and homeliness. Above that was a sweeping curved window, following the same line, that provided a grand, elevated view out over the land.
Suddenly, out of the blue, a man’s face materialised on the windowpane immediately in front of her. It was a two-dimensional projection that blocked a large square of the purple panorama.
Sierra wasn’t surprised. It was she that had initiated the videoconference.
The middle-aged man was now looking