In a far future, humanity is genetically engineered to be perfect, and live clean, useful lives in bureaucratic cities. On the other hand, the travelling bands of raggle- taggle Bideshi are thieves and live in dirty home-ships, inbred and useless. That's the story as taught to schoolchildren, anyway.
Adam Yuga is heading for a new promotion with a planetary mining firm and just has to pass a few standard checks. He is stunned when a medical check fails and he is stripped of job and privileges. Nobody wants to be around someone with any kind of disease. His credits are used up on medical costs but the illness progresses to weakness and tremors. To feed himself he has to steal. But he's a computer engineer, and he can't resist taking too much once he breaks a bank code. An alert is issued and he is saved only by a scruff with dreadlocks who drags him onto a small ship and off the planet.
The Bideshi man, Lochlan, thinks Adam might be useful. However it's quickly a matter of how the Bideshi can help Adam, because their spiritual healer is able to arrest the progress of the illness for a time. Then the official Protectorate fleet comes hunting him down, and it is clear that more than just money is at stake. In LINE AND ORBIT there are obvious echoes of films Silent Running and Avatar, as the Bideshi live in spaceships full of forests and grasslands, programmed to replicate seasons for the plants. The sterile-by-comparison Protectorate consider these gypsy people as little better than animals and intend killing anyone who stands in their way. Adam is so well engineered that he learns to fire weapons and be a fighter pilot almost instantly, and strikes back not just for himself but for Lochlan and his new community. An alien race, the fearsome Klashorg, turns out to have more in common with the Bideshi than their 'pure' cousins.
Adam also learns that the Bideshi are relaxed about alternative sexuality and he starts a relationship with another man for the first time. However this is not a large part of this story by Sunny Moraine and Lisa Soem and need not deter the nervous. While I feel this is an adult novel for several reasons, including language and violence, men and women should equally enjoy it.
What heβs been taught to fear could be his destinyβ¦and his only hope. Adam Yuga, a rising young star in the imperialist Terran Protectorate, is on the verge of a massive promotionβ¦until a routine physical exam reveals something less than perfection. Genetic flaws are taboo, and Adam soon discovers thereβs a thin line between rising star and starving outcast.
Stripped of wealth and position, stricken with a mysterious, worsening illness, Adam resorts to stealing credits to survive. Moments from capture by the Protectorate, help arrives in the form of Lochlan, a brash, cocksure Bideshi fighter.
Now the Bideshi, a people long shunned by the Protectorate, are the only ones who will offer him shelter. As Adam learns the truth about the mysterious, nomadic people he was taught to fear, Lochlan offers him not just shelterβbut a temptation Adam can only resist for so long.
Struggling to adapt to his new life, Adam discovers his illness hides a terrible secret, one that the Protectorate will stop at nothing to conceal. Time is growing short, and he must find the strength to close a centuries-old rift, accept a new identityβand hold on to a love that could cost him everything.
Warning: This title contains brief scenes of explicit violence and mild but potentially triggering homophobia.
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