Epsilon Sector

A collection of eight prequel stories, set in the distant future of the Earth Girl trilogy (Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight)In the year 2788, people use interstellar portals to travel between over a thousand colony worlds scattered across six sectors of space, each with their own contrasting cultures. On the rich worlds of Alpha sector, you aren't considered fully adult until 25, while the frontier worlds of Epsilon sector expect a girl to marry at 17. Clan centred Beta sector is notoriously permissive, while Deltan worlds consider it shocking behaviour to kiss in public. In Kappa sector, the military battle to make new worlds safe for colonization, while Earth is a semi-abandoned ruin. Each story features one of the characters from the Earth Girl trilogy. Eight people, with eight very distinctive backgrounds and problems, all destined to get caught up in one girl's fight for acceptance. A fight that will change Earth forever. EARTH 2788 — Short story. Jarra trespasses on forbidden ground. ALPHA SECTOR 2788 - Short story. Dalmora's sheltered life is about to change. BETA SECTOR 2788 - A novelette. Lolia's marriage is falling apart. GAMMA SECTOR 2788 -Short story. Krath's life is literally on the scrap heap. DELTA SECTOR 2788 - Short story. Fian's father is planning his future for him, but Fian has his own ideas. EPSILON SECTOR 2788 - Short story. On a frontier planet, Amalie is considering possible husbands. KAPPA SECTOR 2788 - A novelette. As he hands over a new world to its first colonists, Colonel Riak Torrek plans to retire. ZETA SECTOR 2788 - A novelette. The heroic Major Drago Tell Dramis has finally found something that scares him.

June 2788. Amalie's the last unmarried girl in Jain's Ford settlement. Life on a frontier farming planet in the twenty-eighth century has a few complications. The imported Earth animals and plants don't always interact well with the local ecology, and there's a shortage of doctors and teachers. The biggest problem though is the fact there are always more male than female colonists arriving from other worlds. Single men outnumber single women by ten to one, and girls are expected to marry at seventeen. Amalie turned seventeen six months ago, and she's had nineteen perfectly respectable offers of marriage. Everyone is pressuring her to choose a husband, or possibly two of them. When Amalie's given an unexpected chance of a totally different future, she's tempted to take it, but then she gets her twentieth offer of marriage and it's one she can't possibly refuse. Frontier is the first novella in the Epsilon Sector Novella sequence featuring Amalie. Please note that most of the first two chapters of Frontier have appeared as the story Epsilon Sector 2788 in the EARTH 2788 short story collection. The other eighteen chapters are entirely new.