We’ll finish off our Terminus slightly-longer-than-a-week with the first glimpse of the deadly Thanaton System.

‘System ahead, Coordinator Terminus.’ Terminus wished Dich would stop calling him that. ‘It’s the Thanatos system.’

Terminus joined the boy at his station.

‘Hey, you can see it in the real-view.’ Sank pointed to his display where darker shapes against the dark background were illuminated by a glowing gleam. The system comprised of thirteen worlds that hung like a necklace around a dark-green glowing sphere. Impossibly, the crew realized that this orb acted as a sun for these worlds. The planets were aligned exactly to form an oval pattern around this stellar mother. Planets in most systems held random patterns in the ecliptic plane around their star, but not this one.

The planets looked to Terminus as if they had been placed into orbit. And what vulleying technology could possibly do that? There weren’t even any other stars nearby, as if its neighbors were shunning this dark Thanatos system…

I hope you’ve enjoyed these Terminus snippets. You can find all of them by clicking this link. And congratulations to the winners of the Terminus competition over on Goodreads. That competition is now closed.

Paul has an extensive vision of the universe that Terminus inhabits, with prequels, sequels and companion pieces to come in what we’re calling the Skyfire Chronicles. The next book, a collection of short stories and novelettes as set in  the Skyfire universe will be launched at Fantasycon 2012, entitled Unauthorised Contact. Paul will be doing signings. If you buy him some snakki, he’ll probably do his Davros impression too…

Click here for more information  on Terminus, including the author’s introductions to space-monsters and space-swearing.