Shamelessly self-promotional, I know, but just wanted to let you know that Chapter Three of my free serialised novel, War Games, is up on my site.

Ahem, for anyone who’s interested …

THE STORY SO FAR: Senior Colonel Cheloi Sie is the cool, disciplined commander of Territory Nineteen, a strategic area of land that’s being held by the Perlim Empire in its bid to crush the rebels on its satellite planet of Menon IV. Her fiercest ally is her adjutant, Major Rumis Swonnessy, and her deadliest enemy is her second-in-command, Sub-Colonel Koul Grakal-Ski.

Two months after Cheloi’s driver/aide is killed in an apparent rebel attack, a replacement is found, but all it does is increase Cheloi’s suspicions, because her new driver is attractive and female … and Koul found her. Is she really who she says she is? Is she really who Koul says she is? Despite her reservations, Cheloi finds herself attracted to her aide. As is her adjutant, Rumis.

Read Chapter Three for a twist in the tale…

You remember how I described War Games as my “platypus” of fiction, because it seems to be neither one thing nor the other? Well, Good Morning Silicon Valley (of all places) had a lovely little piece on platypus research a week ago. I can’t improve on John Murrell’s always scintillating prose, so here it is, courtesy of GMSV:

The platypus (in this case named Glennie) has 18,500 genes, 82 percent of which it shares with the human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken. The rest form a record of evolution working to sort out the differences between reptiles and mammals some 160 million years ago. From the reptile side, it has genes for laying eggs and for making the snake venom it stores in its legs. On the mammalian side, it has genes for antibacterial proteins and lactation (though it didn’t get the code for nipples; Nature does love her little jokes). And instead of having just two chromosomes involved in sex determination (like our X and Y), it has 10, and the researchers aren’t sure what the heck to make of that. In scientific terms, said Richard Wilson, director of the genome center at Washington University in St. Louis, all of this makes it ‘a wacky organism.’ ‘There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus,’ said Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. ‘You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.’

For the originating articles go here (full article is not free) and here. If you’re wondering how a lactating animal can feed its young without nipples (and you are, aren’t you?), be aware that the milk oozes from patches of skin on the mother’s belly. No issues with “latching” there!

I’m proud to associate War Games with such a “wacky” specimen of Earth biology.