Thursday, February 21, 2008
Final Edits Excerpt2
I just finished the final edits for The Last Guardian and returned them to the Editor, so the book should be in print soon. It took several days to go over the manuscript and make the necessary changes. It could have been done quicker if I were feeling better. I'm going to have to have surgery, so may not be writing here for a while. In the mean time, here is another excerpt from The Last Guardian:
The northern lights sang and danced in the heavens like pastel wisps of cotton candy in the evening breeze. Their music, their colorful splendor, their mystery, was lost among the roaring engines and sodium vapor lights. Pump Station Eight was a huge, sprawling complex midway along the trans-Alaska pipeline. Among its numerous structures were shops, warehouses, the pump station itself—a building so large that workers rode bicycles up and down the halls—and a tank farm where crude oil, diesel, and gasoline were stored in checker-shaped containers, each holding over two million gallons of flammable liquids.
Like many other pipeliners, Sarah Jacobson had not seen the night sky for months. The pump station’s lights were just too bright. The first things most workers noticed when they finally got away from the station were the onset of darkness, the stars, and then the northern lights. The workers always wondered how they hadn’t missed the night until it was upon them again.
Sarah had been a security guard throughout construction of the pipeline. Having worked from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, she had seen many strange and sometimes wondrous sights—bears tearing the doors off of trucks to get at lunch bags left on the seats, wolves eating sandwiches from the hands of pipeliners, caribou walking on top of the pipe to avoid the camouflage environmentalists had insisted be used to hide the pipe from caribou, gold nuggets the size of ping-pong balls unearthed by machinery—but never had she seen anything more fascinating than the ravens playing in the exhaust from the jet engines that turned the pumps.
Three enormous engines, each producing enough heat to warm a 40-story office building, were being tested at Pump Station Eight. Scores of the big, black birds were soaring in the updrafts. Lazily, the birds glided up, down and around, their wings spread to catch the warm currents. Some danced together in the heated breeze, others played catch with a foam cup like children with a Frisbee. A few hung nearly motionless in the sky above the station basking in the warmth.
Sarah couldn’t stop watching the spectacle. It was an unexpected delight—a benefit result of the construction beyond economics, but a short-lived benefit for Sarah. The birds suddenly broke away, almost as a unit, soaring out beyond the reach of the lights. For a moment, Sarah wondered what had frightened them. Then she noticed a ragged, quivering smudge on the side of the manifold building.
“What the hell?” Sarah strained to see better. The smudge grew until it was the size of a small house. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. She took a couple of steps toward the manifold building. The smudge was beginning to look like a gigantic hole. An instant later, Sarah Jacobson and Pump Station Eight vanished in a fireball that was seen for thirty miles.
The northern lights sang and danced in the heavens like pastel wisps of cotton candy in the evening breeze. Their music, their colorful splendor, their mystery, was lost among the roaring engines and sodium vapor lights. Pump Station Eight was a huge, sprawling complex midway along the trans-Alaska pipeline. Among its numerous structures were shops, warehouses, the pump station itself—a building so large that workers rode bicycles up and down the halls—and a tank farm where crude oil, diesel, and gasoline were stored in checker-shaped containers, each holding over two million gallons of flammable liquids.
Like many other pipeliners, Sarah Jacobson had not seen the night sky for months. The pump station’s lights were just too bright. The first things most workers noticed when they finally got away from the station were the onset of darkness, the stars, and then the northern lights. The workers always wondered how they hadn’t missed the night until it was upon them again.
Sarah had been a security guard throughout construction of the pipeline. Having worked from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, she had seen many strange and sometimes wondrous sights—bears tearing the doors off of trucks to get at lunch bags left on the seats, wolves eating sandwiches from the hands of pipeliners, caribou walking on top of the pipe to avoid the camouflage environmentalists had insisted be used to hide the pipe from caribou, gold nuggets the size of ping-pong balls unearthed by machinery—but never had she seen anything more fascinating than the ravens playing in the exhaust from the jet engines that turned the pumps.
Three enormous engines, each producing enough heat to warm a 40-story office building, were being tested at Pump Station Eight. Scores of the big, black birds were soaring in the updrafts. Lazily, the birds glided up, down and around, their wings spread to catch the warm currents. Some danced together in the heated breeze, others played catch with a foam cup like children with a Frisbee. A few hung nearly motionless in the sky above the station basking in the warmth.
Sarah couldn’t stop watching the spectacle. It was an unexpected delight—a benefit result of the construction beyond economics, but a short-lived benefit for Sarah. The birds suddenly broke away, almost as a unit, soaring out beyond the reach of the lights. For a moment, Sarah wondered what had frightened them. Then she noticed a ragged, quivering smudge on the side of the manifold building.
“What the hell?” Sarah strained to see better. The smudge grew until it was the size of a small house. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. She took a couple of steps toward the manifold building. The smudge was beginning to look like a gigantic hole. An instant later, Sarah Jacobson and Pump Station Eight vanished in a fireball that was seen for thirty miles.
