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    The Troll Bridge
    The Troll Bridge
    The Troll Bridge
    Ebook50 pages46 minutes

    The Troll Bridge

    By Patti O'Shea

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This is a short story that was originally published in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF TIME TRAVEL ROMANCE.

    Lia Stanton, a woman who likes things safe, accidentally gets caught in a wormhole when she's just supposed to be getting a nice, easy fluff piece to write. It throws her forward in time and space, landing her on a planet she doesn't recognize. On the heels of her arrival, she's accused of espionage and forms a connection to a man she never should have met.

    Troll Maglaya is on his third tour of duty on Jarved Nine. Just when he thinks nothing here can surprise him, he's assigned to watch a suspected spy. As soon as he sees Lia, he knows her claim of time travel is true--he's carried a drawing of her for years, one made fifty years earlier.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPatti O'Shea
    Release dateApr 24, 2019
    ISBN9781950740000
    The Troll Bridge
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    Author

    Patti O'Shea

    Nationally bestselling author Patti O'Shea has won thirteen awards for her writing and been nominated for many more. Her books have appeared on the Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, and Borders bestseller lists and have earned starred reviews in prestigious publications such as Publishers Weekly and Booklist. At various points in her life, Patti O'Shea wanted to be a doctor, a pilot, an archeologist, an astronomer, a figure skater, a ballerina, an oceanographer, a marine biologist, and a photographer before she discovered writing at the age of fourteen. That's when she knew what she really wanted to be when she grew up. By the time she entered the University of Minnesota, she realized she'd need a practical career. She chose the School of Journalism and took classes in nearly every discipline the college offered. After graduating with a degree in Advertising Copywriting (and far more credits than she needed), she promptly went to work for Northwest Airlines-in accounting. Since then she's moved throughout the company, working in departments like Technical Records, Tech Publications, and is currently in 757 Engineering. Born with a need to see everything, Patti has traveled to far off and exotic places like Papua New Guinea, Fanning Island, and the Yukon Territory in Canada. Along the way, she's had the opportunity to experience a lot of cool things. In Alaska, she saw a humpback whale breach near the catamaran on which she sailed; she's visited a salt mine in Austria and traveled to a lower level by sliding down a wooden rail; and she's seen a shark fin break the water in Australia right next to the small boat she was on. She's visited just about every one of King Ludwig's castles in Germany; watched the cliff divers of Acapulco; and was nearly mugged in a parking lot in Los Angeles. With her wanderlust sated, Patti finally decided to get serious about writing. She quickly discovered that her travel and her eclectic education were all training to become an author. It's helped her to know a little bit about a lot of things since she's had characters that have been computer geeks, army officers, private investigators, demons, thieves, and other assorted careers. She's even managed to incorporate pieces of some of the places she's visited into her stories.

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      Book preview

      The Troll Bridge - Patti O'Shea

      One

      Lia glanced around the control room. It looked so ordinary, so boring—industrial gray carpeting, neutral walls, even the windows on the far side of the room were normal. She expected something more at a cutting-edge facility like the particle accelerator. The only thing that separated this place from a regular office was the curved desks with two tiers of flat-screen computer monitors lined up side by side.

      Even the scientists seemed pedestrian, dressed in slacks with oxford or polo shirts. Couldn't there at least be one guy running around in a white lab coat with his hair going twenty different directions like Albert Einstein?

      Everyone around her was busy doing something, but she had no idea what. She'd grown accustomed to interviewing engineers as part of her job in corporate communications for Park International, but this was her first time dealing with physicists. She hoped it was her last.

      The man she was supposed to talk to had listened to about three questions and answered none before he'd dumped her off on an intern. The kid knew a lot about the particle accelerator and was nervously rambling, which might have been good for her article in the monthly employee magazine except that she needed to quote someone with credentials.

      It was too bad. This boy, Derrick, was going to be an asset someday. Earlier, he'd seen her blank look and had immediately started speaking in layman's terms. That was worth its weight in gold.

      Today's experiment was supposed to rev the particles up to their highest rate of speed so far and she'd been sent to cover it. This was a Big Deal and the order had come from the top of the food chain, but Doctor I'm-Too-Important-To-Talk-To-You didn't care who had issued the assignment.

      To her surprise, she'd found what little she'd understood about particle physics interesting, and since the kid wouldn't give her crap, she decided to ask a question that had intrigued her since she'd researched the atom smasher.

      Derrick, Lia interjected when he paused, I read something about the particle accelerator maybe creating black holes. Is this any kind of real hazard?

      No, ma'am. He shrugged self-consciously. The possibility is so minute, it's nearly inconceivable. If any do happen to actualize, they'll wink out in a fraction of a second. They're too small and unstable to maintain their existence long.

      That was a relief. Although she'd guessed the odds of making a black hole that swallowed Earth were small, it was still nice to hear it from someone who knew physics—even if he was in college.

      Derrick didn't stop, though. It's also unlikely that we'll create any wormholes either, and if we did, they'd be so small that only subatomic particles would be transported.

      Lia hadn't read anything on that. Wormholes?

      Wormholes are tubes that traverse space, time, or both and if we find one and could travel through—

      "I've seen Star Trek, I know what wormholes are, but I didn't realize we could make them," she told him ruefully. Okay, so it was slightly embarrassing to use a television show as reference material, but the reading she'd done on particle physics had turned her brain to gelatin.

      He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. We can't. That's what I was explaining. The idea that we might produce a wormhole is every bit as remote as the black hole theory although it is mathematically possible.

      That's kind of disappointing, she murmured.

      Derrick smiled for the first time. Tell me about it, but it was proven that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge would shut as soon as it formed, closing—

      He stopped

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