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The seventh Aeolus Investigations adventure joins Lexi Stevens with a new team on board the sentient starship Apollo led by her son (see title) Crane Samue.

Back in the Accord after, well let’s call it an interesting, honeymoon, Lexi Stevens and Ron Samue are looking into the existence of yet another ancient artifact, a fourth horseman of the Apocalypse.

Lexi Stevens, Marshal of the Accord, has been trapped, captured, and drugged by an enemy people named the Gadtons. That, and the fact that they have six fingers on each hand, is all she knows about them. Whatever interrogation drug they’re giving her is causing massive hallucinations.

Her husband, Ron Samue, plows in to the rescue. When asked, he always replies semi-seriously that rescuing Lexi is in his job description. He’s done it before. He expects he’ll be doing it again. This time, much to his surprise, a second Aeolus team shows up to assist with the rescue.

The new team is led by his adult son, Crane Samue. He claims Lexi is his mother. Which would make sense if it wasn’t just plain weird.

You see, Ron and Lexi don’t have any children. At least not yet.

Ron, being Ron, wonders where the DeLorean is parked. What he doesn’t realize is that the mission Crane and his team are on is far more critical than simply the rescue of Crane’s mom. That’s only the beginning.

In order to save people she loves, Lexi has to mess with the fabric of time itself. Which makes everything, well, risky!

Mom — Chapter 5, Morning Coffee

The next morning as she replicated a mug of coffee, Lexi idly wondered if Crane had inherited his father’s inexplicable talent for making unbelievably good coffee. I wonder if I ever figure that one out. I’ve been working on it for years. I could ask. Probably shouldn’t. Maybe it’s time to take a break from adventure and have a baby. That’s what the one vacation we attempted was about, at least until life butted in. She smiled to herself. I already like the way Crane turns out. Hmm. I won’t be able to mention this to him until whatever year they came back from, will I? Awkward.

Four hours sleep had given Lexi time to fully heal and flush the residual drugs from her system. Over the last fifteen years she took Accord technology and upgraded it past the point where the Accord could otherwise have expected to reach in the next thousand years, probably longer, considering technology growth had largely stagnated. Not that she made all of those upgrades freely available. By the same token, she upgraded the human physiology, at least that of her friends and associates, increasing their speed and strength far beyond the human norm. They called them hulk-meds among themselves. True, she once had almost killed her life-mate Ron in the process. He never held it against her. In short, even without the agents the med-pack had been infusing into her system last night, she expected she would still have been fully recovered by now.

Lexi took her coffee into the bridge area and sat in one of the command chairs. She expected the others would be asleep for several hours yet. She needed less sleep than most people. She wondered if Crane followed her pattern in that respect. She recalled that he hadn’t slept much as an infant in the flying monkey dream.

Assuming her current reality wasn’t drug-induced and that she was actually awake and traveling through time with her son, some of that dream had now proved to be precognitive. In her dream, a pale platinum-blonde waitperson named Risha told Lexi that she and Ron reminded her of her boyfriend’s parents. She smiled as she recalled that the dream Risha had been their waitress in the restaurant scene of the M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. This Risha brought her food last night. And, yes, she looks exactly like the Risha in the dream.

Lexi sat for several minutes, watching the pulsing energy fields through which the craft was traveling. The display was almost hypnotic. She wondered how much was translated for human senses. Are we headed into the future or into the past? Urania, one of her closest friends who, like Apollo, was a sentient computer housed in a starship, saw hyperspace very differently from her human companions, even when they suited up and surfed the hyper-flux in her wake.

Urania, like Lexi’s husband Ron, was now dead. Lexi had been holding her grief in check, trying to focus on other thoughts, like making coffee, time warps, and having babies. Now, though, she couldn’t help weeping despite the small thread of hope that Risha held out last night. Time can be altered.

It hadn’t been so long ago that she had taken a small thread of hope and used it to take leadership of the Accord in order to defeat the Kreesh. It was a position she never imagined and, in all honesty, never wanted. Yet, if she hadn’t, everyone on every world of the Accord would have died in a pretty horrible fashion. It would have taken centuries for the Kreesh to eat everybody, true, but without her, the Accord wouldn’t have been able to stop them. Maybe, again, a small thread would be good enough. Maybe that was all she needed. She wiped the tears from her face and said, “Good morning, Apollo.”

His avatar appeared, still in Roman garb, a headband of laurel leaves about his head. “Good morning, gorgeous.”

Lexi laughed. “I wish you would stop calling me that.”

Apollo bowed, and said, “No problem, Mom.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that, either. Let’s stick with ‘Lexi,’ shall we?”

“Damn,” Apollo said, “You’re really no different now than you are in my time-reference. How are you dealing with all of this, love?” As he finished his question, he changed into a Star Trek uniform and took a seat in one of the chairs.

“Oh, I’m fine, Lieutenant. In theory, I’ve not only lost Ron, I’ve also lost Urania. There’s overwhelming evidence in the form of the man sleeping with Risha in their cabin that we can fix that. At least I don’t need to worry about Geena, she’s on Earth with Dad. She’s going to have a baby soon, a little girl. I’m looking forward to that. I hope I’m back in time to be there for her. They delayed their wedding several times waiting for Ron and me to get back from our so-called vacation. Harder to delay a delivery.”

“In my time-line,” Apollo said, “I’ve met her. They name her Alexa. I can’t tell you anything more than that. We all agreed we need to limit your knowledge of your future, so please don’t hack my files or surf in my crew’s memories. We trust you, Lexi, to do what you know is right.”

She nodded, a serious expression on her face. “The mathematics of time has been floating around in the back of my mind ever since I assimilated the Wraixain knowledge. I’ve been too busy to work it out, though. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.”

Apollo nodded. “I think I understand. Time-threading, what little we know about it, is incredibly dangerous. This was all thrust on us unexpectedly, too. We didn’t even know I could time-jump until we threaded back to the Gadton asteroid. However, we are confident that bringing you on board and exposing you to this knowledge at this time is the right thing to do. I could even say the necessary thing to do.” He paused, his pleasant features never changing, as he added, “We’re following the boss’s instructions, you see. Your instructions.”

As she got up to get more coffee, she asked, “Care to elaborate?”

Mom is available on Amazon.com