I was thinking about the novel I referred to yesterday (the one whose plot is a bit too close to Avatar to really try and sell now, thanks, Cameron!). I figure, if I’m going to bury the damn thing anyway, might as well post some of it here. Why not? So here are the first ~8,000 words or so of The Only Time, by Your Humble Author. Love to hear your thoughts, private or public, on it.

THE ONLY TIME

by Jeff Somers

I. The Long Dark

1.

Hollith was hell.

2.

One thousand men and women died on Hollith every day, defending the Pump Stations and fighting for control of new territory on hot, wet Hollith. No one could say accurately how many Holls died every day, and very few people asked.

Hollith was a large planet second from its sun. There were few bodies of water to speak of. It appeared to be one huge land mass, covered almost completely by vegetation. The only non-vegetable life forms on Hollith were insects, microbes, and the creatures that everyone called, simply, The Holls. No one who hadn’t seen one could understand what they were like, or so it was said.

On video they appeared to ape-like, a grey-white in color, with rudimentary faces comprised of a jagged rip for a mouth and two small, dark eyes. They had fearsome claws and a thin, fleshy frame that sagged almost comically when they were viewed in captivity.

On Hollith, in the jungles that were their homes, the Holls were terror. Their entire bodies acted as sails as they leapt from tree to tree, flying short distances, like bats. In the endless rains of Hollith they blended into the night and were invisible. They clawed through bullet-proof vests with small difficulty and they screeched. Grown soldiers heard that sound in their sleep, and shivered involuntarily.

The Holls attacked in groups, which the soldiers called Tribes. From fifteen to thirty at once in an attack. If the Holls had the element of surprise, a similarly numbered human patrol usually suffered fifty-percent casualties, at the least. The Holls usually had surprise. There was no way to accurately track them: their body temperature did not vary noticeably from the atmosphere’s, and they rarely seemed to gather in numbers sufficient to track excretory gasses.

On Earth, many of these facts were at best little-known. The predominant theory as to why these nontechnological savages continued to offer stuff resistance to the human invasion was: sheer numbers, meaning there were simply too many Holls. The fact was, Military Intelligence could not accurately say how many Holls there were. They died at an incredible rate, and still they came on. They died and died and died —were slaughtered— and yet, after twenty years of war the human race held only three percent of Hollith, and that precariously. And the humans died and died and died —were slaughtered— and the Holls never spoke, never retreated, and never relented.

Hollith was hell.

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