Burst, a novel by Thomas Knobel
Copyright 2007, all rights reserved
Burst is my newly released Sci Fi novel, several years in the making. What begins as a murder mystery on one hand and a scientific puzzle on the other, leads a young scientist and his team to startling revelations. At the same time, the shocking death of a fellow astronaut, sets a determined young woman on the path to the ultimate sacrifice.
Trust, loyalties, and friendships are challenged; love is lost; and love is lost and found again. Millions might die to save billions and our world could change for ever...or end in an instant.
Excerpt -
Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Morphine was useless. The pain originated within the fractured molecules of his nerve cells. Every vital organ had failed except for a brain screaming noiselessly for relief or release. Through a haze of waxy tears, with a furnace burning behind his eyes, he could see his own chest, swollen twice normal size, with hairless, translucent skin stretched thin like a kid’s red balloon. Blood and other liquid oozed from splits and tears where his skin could yield no more.
A half-dozen men stood, surrounding his hospital bed in a rough semi-circle. Doctors and nurses had worked frantically over him for weeks as his condition deteriorated, always concerned, never able to meet his plaintive, frightened eyes. Now they were gone and these men coldly looked him up and down, mildly curious, appointed witnesses for the end. Two, he recognized, one a friend since the early days of the program. With every synapse inflamed, his mind wasn’t working well enough to remember a name, though he’d known this man for thirty years. All that remained was a vague sense of comradeship and trust. But with his swollen lips and throat constricting tightly on a narrow, hard plastic breathing tube, he couldn’t beg his friend for the release he so desperately needed, even if such a favor could be granted.
Grasping for sanity, some atom of reality, the Colonel struggled to focus on his friend’s uniform jacket with its colorful and glittery rows of campaign ribbons, badges, and stars. Each meant something…something important, memorable, real. But what? Like oil on water, the colors swirled and mixed before dispersing completely. Yet above them all, a golden astronaut’s badge flashed like a landing beacon even as the rest of the light in the room mercifully dimmed in fast-falling twilight...
Burst is now available as an eBook through Amazon's Kindle store formatted for Kindles, iPads, PCs, iPhones, and MACs.