James B Brandt

WGA-W Registration: #1284161

 

Genre: Science Fiction/Adventure

 

Tagline: When the choice is survival or doing what's right...

 

Logline: Martin Hawkins is an undocumented alien on a planet teetering on revolution. Victim of a mugging, waiting for new papers, his main goal is to avoid the notice of the authorities. But when he sees a young girl in trouble, automatic responses take over. Suddenly, Hawkins is in the middle of a political firestorm with a simple choice: run and abandon the girl to her fate or get her to shelter and hope to survive.

 

Synopsis: The night is dark; rain drips off the top of his alley shelter in what could be Prague, Budapest, or Bucharest in another century on another world. He’s been here over a week, an interstellar castaway caught in the slow moving wheels of bureaucracy after a mugging; his identity stolen and the company samples missing, he can do little more than count the days until his employer ships new papers, a little money, and a lot of hope to a backwater world on the edge of the Empire.

 

He looks up at the sound of voices, huddling deeper into his improvised shelter he watches in silence as a young couple stop to argue a few feet away. Not his business; best if he stays hidden, out of sight and mind of an unsympathetic public who might complain to the less sympathetic and brutal police. But when the young man backhands his companion – little more than a girl – old instincts take over. From the second he sends the young bully crashing to the ground, he triggers a series of events that could turn an entire planet into a battle zone.

 

As the machinery of a paramilitary police state begins to wake, Martin Hawkins begins a desperate race to return Anio, the young girl he saved from a beating, to her father in a small town a short train ride away before her date – the Prime Minister’s son – can call down the wrath of his father on the fleeing pair. And that wrath is quickly coming, as a sinister plot is peeled away layer by layer revealing the fate that was planned for the girl and center of the political interests that oppose the Prime Minister’s to usurp more and more power from a weak and uninvolved king.

 

What looked to Hawkins like a simple plan – take the girl to the train station, then vanish back into the night – quickly grows more desperate as every avenue of escape is blocked by fast-acting response teams. Chased by police and military patrols, the pair work their way toward the docks, where Anio’s father arranges a pick-up. But the power of the government quickly shuts down all avenues and soon unleashes a horror from Old Earth nightmares to track the pair and eliminate them and their knowledge of the foiled plot.

 

As death - both human and fearsomely alien - stalks their footsteps, Hawkins and Anio stumble on a cache of stolen weapons that keep the Prime Minister’s forces at bay long enough for Anio to make a cliff hanging escape. Free of his responsibility, free at last to fade into the dawn, Hawkins evades the last few police between the smoldering ruin of a pub he just quitted and the empty streets of the city only to come face to face with a monstrous terror that is sorely in a foul mood… and Hawkins must face one last, hopeless battle without a weapon, with no time to run, and nowhere to hide.

 

Sci-Fi * 110 pages * Copyright PAu003350928