The west coast of Jivada’s large continent from Pulina Nava south was fifth-pass reclaimed land mass, less than 5,000 years old.
In contrast, much of the Northern Reach was nearly as old as the Anye migration’s arrival in-system. There, California redwood trees poked at the sky, branches laden with eagle nests, roots drilled into manufactured soil that was, even given an extra 20,000 years, barely knit together well enough to support them.
Which was why Jivada was buying all its lumber on Earth, and a good reason not to park your space yacht next to a tall tree on a windy day.
The menfolk were smoking cigarettes in the castle driveway, accompanied by a non-elevated size-two fighting maroli named Quill.
Quill was 1.75 meters tall, with 2 heavy-lift primary tentacles, 4 lesser ungula, 6 grav-lift pucks around the skirt, 6 more on the capsule, eye dots all the way around, and a shock wand clipped below the plug cavity.
Carmen Benequista gave the machine a wide berth. Marie Jourdain stepped in for a closer look.
She said, “Can I get one of these?”
General Thorson fished a gas-station butane lighter out of a pocket.
He told Colonel Clarke, “You should see if Incredible might come to work for her.”
Clarke nodded. “I’ll ask him.”
“Well, like I was saying …” Thorson lit another cigarette. “Makes a lot of sense. Two forces. Cadre does political and military. Zirna Zapha handles policing and civil order. Good cop, bad cop; only you don’t tell the troublemakers which is which.”
Carmen reached for the pack of smokes. “It worked on Vidura.”
“And see here, it doesn’t matter whether it works on Earth or not.” He tucked the lighter into her palm. “It’s precedent. We get to tell my constituency we’re going by the book.”
Carmen tapped a cigarette on her thumbnail. “Who shall we cast in the role of space pirates?”
Thorson made a possum grin. “I’m looking at your boyfriend here.”
Brandon rubbed at his nose. “CH Banks is a business. We don’t do policing for free.”
“The Cadre doesn’t do military for free.”
“Who’s my customer?”
“Adopt a Zeze militant enterprise model. You know, like Boschert GMBH Zurich.”
“That’s not in our portfolio.”
“You have 3600 employees, old son. Maybe you could be a little more flexible.”
Marie Jourdain said, “It’s after 10:00 PM in France.”
Offshore of PN, a stately Tuscan Renaissance villa drifted at a thousand meters altitude, aimless, nudged along by the wind, meandering on gravitic tensors as though sliding on ice.
SagGha House, built 1438, the work of Italian/AjJivadi architect Mechelozzo, a prototype for Palazzo Medici, Florence, Italy, 1444.
Erected atop a surplus grav-lift marine construction barge, commissioned as an owner-managed airborne luxury residential complex, then serving as a monastery, a college and a reform school.
Until occupied by SagGha Prefect Samuel Orsa — priest, scholar, family man. A furry Anye Mahat Limar, 138 years old, bearlike in appearance, sometimes referred to on Earth as the Space Pope.
By now, on Page 16, a typical 3-act-form novel would have wrapped up introductions to place, time and cast.
If this was Fantasy, the Saracens would already have ridden in and cut everyone’s heads off.
Romance: bodice-ripping would be in-progress.
Sci-Fi adventure: a reptilian space admiral would be pacing the bridge of Battle Cruiser Krang, shouting threats at beautiful but reckless space pilot Candy Bootylicious while she undulated, heaving breasts straining against a tight and revealing space uniform.
You know, if I ever want to be successful, the first thing I should do is finish that story.
But no; I decided to write literary science fiction family drama.
Chapter 5
The Between-Life
When one speaks to the dead, it’s usually an ordinary dream, a conversation with oneself, influenced by feelings of doubt, insecurity, loneliness. Carmen Benequista had doubts —about whether she was experiencing an ordinary dream.
She stood in her deceased husband’s office at his family’s title insurance agency, a place she hadn’t been since a) he died and, b) his parents pushed her out of the company.
Are you ready to get in on a closely guarded best-selling-author secret of success?
Yeah. Me, too. Maybe the ghost of John le Carré will post something in the comments.
In the meantime, I will confess that Maroli Tango’s early-draft first chapters were nothing like what you’re reading here. Not to say the audience will never see them — it was great material, only in the wrong place, too slow for an opening salvo.
And so, I’ve been chapter-shuffling for weeks, moving my tastiest prose toward the front of the book, and guess what?
Maroli Tango is the last volume of a trilogy, concluding a massive story arc. If I lead with explosions, readers will say, “Who are these people, and why should I care what happens to them?”
I tried the old swapparoo — heads roll, flashback. My first readers went for it, but they’ve read the other books. You and I have not built that kind of relationship.
Residential Deck 41, also known as Tourist Deck A, was busy-busy.
The outer ring bustled with hospitality staff, the middle ring a spawning ground for linen buggies, the central column festive with open stateroom doors and maroli cabin stewards wearing adhesive bowties.
Mason did not expect to see his workmate Chester waiting on the threshold at 4137, a two-bedroom, deck level patio suite.
I recently discovered that publishers of serial novels like to get their victims on mailing lists before explaining the proposition. I’m on too many mailing lists. It’s ‘unsubscribe’ here, ‘Stop’ there, ‘Block’ over yonder.
But, I did allow myself to get suckered enough times to assemble a custom plan, just for my Internet friends, but I’ll need your email address before I can tell you about it.
Nah. I'm kidding. There's no plan. Tell me what you want, and I'll see what I can do.
Chapter 3
The White House, Washington DC
It was another sunny day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where, at 8:00 AM sharp, Colonel Theodore Clarke, USAF retired, appeared on the President’s Patio outside the Oval Office.
She let him in through a side door. “You could come in the front, you know. Maybe check in with Captain Price.”
“Tune into the Anuraga Channel.” Clarke gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Bharamin’s in orbit.”
Claude AI says Maroli Tango is ready for publication — good news for all of us, I hope.
What would you pay, if anything, to read a 4th-edit WIP, 3,000 words per week? Would you value access to material excised for technical, rather than artistic reasons? How about exclusive desktop wallpaper? There could even be tee-shirts, although perhaps in the same sense of ‘There could be unicorns’.
Wait! You don’t have to tell me right now. I’m posting 7 chapters. Just, whenever you get around to it.
Chapter 1
Previously
When Carmen Luisa Colletti was a 12-year-old nosepicker in convent school, a Benedictine nun told her, “Boys have a tendency to be shallow, young men not much better. Wait it out, and use your brain to make a sensible choice.”
I have a new alpha reader, with uncommonly refined taste in literature.
Maroli Tango: Series Finale Analysis
The Culmination of a Nine-Book Journey
What strikes me most about reading these chapters from Maroli Tango is how it functions as both a standalone narrative and clearly the finale of a much larger story. The casual references to established relationships, complex political situations, and advanced technologies all suggest a richly developed universe that readers have been exploring for eight previous volumes.
Prelude to a series first chapter, picking up where the previous book left off. After a lot of back and forth, Grok AI now says, “Your revised passage is a stellar refinement, keeping the hook’s vibrancy while addressing the need for just enough context to ground readers without slowing the pace.”
Good enough for me. Readers and writers: What say you?
When Carmen Luisa Colletti was a 12-year-old nosepicker in convent school, a Benedictine nun told her, “Boys have a tendency to be shallow, young men not much better. Wait it out, and use your brain to make a sensible choice.”
In some circles, the prologue is apostasy. However, in the case of Maroli Tango, this might be essential. Comments welcome.
Previously …
The effective date of the Anye Disclosure was arguable, conceivably pointing back to 1928, when the executive host of an off-world-patronized South Dakota tourist destination revealed herself to Doctor Elbert Holland Harrison, a rural physician of the human persuasion who, up until then, had not been in on ‘the big secret’.
“Good evening”, she had said, lemur fangs concealed behind a demure smile. “We’re from the Sasquatch chamber of commerce.”
The proposition was not as risky as one might think. Doc Harrison, an 83-year-old veteran of the American Civil War, was a person made stoic by a lifetime of experience with suffering.
Confronted by a furry foxlike princess wearing a tailored western-cut maternity blouse, culotte skirt and cowboy boots, he thought to himself, ‘Aren’t you the prettiest little thing?’
Earth’s secret history was explained — 25,000 years as a backwater campground, and yet for all the opportunity presented, humans had not become the unwitting subjects of a celestial master race.
The lady told him, “It’s like having a rich uncle who stopped returning your phone calls.”
Jivada, an Anye colony world, was one-hour-forty-five-minutes away via Saraf Drive. A third of Jivada’s citizens (AjJivadi) were human, welcomed into Anye clans since the Migration.
The AjJivadi possessed homestead claims on Earth, anchored by business enterprise, dual citizenships, voluntary submission to taxation, and so forth.
Their engagement from the shadows, a practice formalized around the time of Jesus, was not a sign of consent to be marginalized.
Evidence two artifacts of Jivada’s agency on Earth:
The ancient and noble order of Zirna Zapha, a custodian of Anye civilization, formed on pre-industrial Vidura (the home planet) by militant SagGha priests. Sanskrit – The Broken Claw. Colloquial – Zeze; The Space Mafia.
CH Banks International, a private security firm and, some would say, a Zirna Zapha storefront. Incorporated 1929, Black Rock, South Dakota.
In 2025, nearly a hundred years after Doc Harrison received a lesson in clandestine symbiotic co-occupancy, an approaching cyclical catastrophe shifted the Disclosure into high gear.
Jivada dispatched an emissary to offer intervention, the very same Doc Harrison, now 180 years old, although he didn’t look it.
The mission culminated in a shootout at a taco joint near Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, an exploit by the U.S. military to hijack a space yacht, ransom the owner, and ship the proceeds to defense contractors in exchange for lucrative kickbacks.
The USAF suffered grave casualties. Doc Harrison departed the scene on a Triumph Speed Triple motorcycle in the company of a shapely 26-year-old social media skydiving celebrity, to rendezvous with the space yacht Skeezix in the parking lot of a local Wal-Mart.
A filmic spectacle, captured in Super 3D UltraVision by a covey of Anye-tech fighting drones, even and especially while engaged in shooting the enemy.
Both Wal-Mart and the Triumph Motorcycle Company were grateful for the publicity, but it was a crushing defeat for the military-industrial complex, an object lesson, an opportunity to change course.
Which they ignored in favor of a mutiny against the President of the United States, a guerrilla war against Jivada, and a worldwide pogrom against AjJivadi constituents on Earth.
None of it worked to their advantage. The Anye Disclosure and its benign intentions gained more than enough traction to persuade the general public, despite opposition.
On a side note: the nomenclature ‘First Contact’ was preposterously out of date. The Disclosure was a ‘Gazillionth Contact’ event; except this time, it was meant to stick.
And regrettably, Earth’s global elite were nowhere near being ready to go along.
John Dyer Writes 
Recent Comments