It’s Sunday, and time for weekend Writing Warrior (click the logo above for links to other snippets) and Snippet Sunday (click on the logo below.)
I’m still posting from the beginning of Rescue Operation, my almost-ready-to-send-out science fiction novel, and still in Zhaim’s point of view. He has just maneuvered Roi into checking on a situation off-planet that Roi’s medical training should help with. Now he needs to get rid of Roi’s closest allies before the Council finds out that Horizon has voted to leave the Confederation.
No indication Roi felt any preconditional warning, though Zhaim was quite sure he had used CP.
He’d need to get Derik and Kaia on off-planet assignments, too, since they almost always voted with Roi. So long as twenty were present, problems could be resolved by a simple majority vote. Zhaim had ten votes he could count on, though two often sided with Roi at his suggestion—it wouldn’t do for Roi to know how many Zhaim could control. Four more of the councilors were genuine swing voters, but he thought he’d prepared the ground with them.
Two days later, a communications problem threatening to cause a war took Kaia off planet, and three days after that word came of a possible contact with an unknown sentient species. Derik, by far the best xenotelepath among the R’il’noids, was the obvious choice to handle that problem.
Scene break here. Next week we’ll see a later Council meeting, and Zhaim’s “solution.”
