Happy New year, Nerd Smith Consolidated welcomes you to 2026. If your New year’s goal is to read more books, NSC has you covered. We published two great sci-fi novels in 2025. The opening act of the space opera The Descendant Saga, titled Altar of Scales, and its action packed thriller sequel, Cave in the Sky. Pick up a copy of one or both, to get some great sci-fi about the indomitable human spirit to help you meet your 2026 reading goals.
Subscribe to this monthly newsletter with the sign up below, to stay informed, because in 2026 we will be publishing the third installment of The Descendant Saga series, titled Knowledge of Gods, by our resident chief nerd and greatest sci-fi author Chace Randolph. We have also picked up a fantasy novel, whose author and title will remain a surprise. Nerd Smith Consolidated’s 2026 goals are to at least publish both of those novels.
We released the second book in The Descendant Saga December 2025, just before Christmas, and it’s already getting reviews like
“…This is old-school scifi. Action. Spaceships. Detailed descriptions of technology. Quippy dialogue between action. I love old-school scifi and Cave in the Sky delivers…”
and
“… The action is wonderful as are the descriptions of the tech. The descriptions of the tech goes into exquisite detail. You are there with every serial number.
You’ll recognize most of the character types because they are well executed. That’s the grizzled sergeant. This is the gal with whom no one will mess because she will destroy you by any means necessary because that’s how a woman gets to that high-level position in the military structure. These are soldiers who don’t care about your feelings or nice. The enemy really is the enemy.
There are easter eggs so you can play along with this futuristic setting that still feels familiar.
Solid recommend if you love old-school scifi that has a rattling good story well executed in a continuing series.”
Our plans for the month of January, to work toward publishing those books, starting with a system overhaul. We have already acquired new SSD’s and will be upgrading our computers. We also have a new domain, and will be rolling out a new, dedicated Nerd Smith Consolidated website soon, plus even more surprises. 2025 may have been our founding, but 2026 is going to be even bigger and better. Buy our books to keep up with the lore as we publish more great stories you actually want to read and not more “AI assisted” slop that the world is trying to push on us. Nerds like us stick together to keep the community, the creativity and the art alive. Let not the classics die…
Speaking of “lore” and “alive” here’s another banger of a short story from our resident author ‘n’ chief Chace. A small snapshot into the sci-fi universe of The Descendant Saga.
Sub lieutenant Valeria fumbled in the darkness, feeling her way down the access shaft until she found the hatch. There are few things as isolating as the complete darkness, and absolute silence inside a dead spaceship. She’d been alone in the depths of the tertiary machinery space buried in the bowels of her frigate, somewhere between the reactor and the engines. Engineering had said something about power anomalies, and she’d gone down to check on them when the call to battle stations sounded in her headset. Thirty seconds later, before she could get her tools stowed in her bag again, a massive bang echoed across the ship and everything went dark. Something big had happened, she’d felt the vibration in the walls of the access shaft as the lights went out.
The absolute blackness and silence told the young engineer many things. The reactor had scrammed, and the battery backups hadn’t come on. She didn’t like being this close to the reactor, and hesitated at the latch now that she had fumbled to it. It wasn’t warm, so there was no fire on the other side, but what if it was vacuum? She rested her forehead on the cold, unfeeling metal of the aged little ship. Embracing the sensation, touch was all she had left, the silence and blackness had stolen her other senses.
“What’s a girl to do?” she thought aloud.
A soft, breathy voice in the void answered. “Well, we can’t stay in here forever.”
Valeria yelped, a shrill noise hitting the stillness like a brick through a window.
“Relax, sub lieutenant, It’s Octo 1476, not the demons of humanity’s past come to haunt you from the deep. Where I belong. Allow me to open the hatch.”
Before Valeria could collect herself or answer, the gentle, but firm grip of the Occto’s arm wrapped around ankle leg, the two meter, thirty kilogram Octopus slithered up her body toward the hatch.
Valeria struggled to hold her composure as the writhing mass of muscle and scientific bio engineering slithered over her, the enveloping arms and shrewd sentience griping her in ways no human ever could. A wall of light punched her in the eyes, Valeria physically recoiled and looked away, the brilliant light beating on her eye lids like police with a warrant.
Octo 1476 stretched from Valeria’s shoulder, her many grasping arms finding purchase on the hatch. The brilliant cold white glow of 1476’s flashlight, power washed the cramped compartment like chalk on a public sidewalk.
Valeria’s eyes adjust as 1476 undogged the hatch, her mind working again as her vision was returned to her. “No wait. Don’t open the hatch!”
1476’s many flailing arms and their undulation shadows stopped. “Why sub lieutenant?”
“We don’t know what’s on the other side, what if the compartment has depressurized?”
What if it hasn’t?”
“But we don’t know.”
“We’ll we can’t stay in here forever.” The Octo’s skin faded through several shades of red and pink as the odd creature’s split nervous system rifled through a range of emotions.
“We’ve lost power, and who knows why. The rector is shut down, and it’s right above us. It there’s a radiation leak, that hatch is the only thing between us and it, air pressure or not.”
“Sub Lieutenant, the metal of one hatch is not going to spare us from the radiation if there is a leak.”
“It’s better than nothing even if it’s only fractional. It could cook us alive, re arrange our DNA. Do you feel warm?”
“Rearrange our DNA? You humans have been doing that to my kind for what the past fifty years? a hundred? that’s twenty generations by our standards. What harm’s a little more gunna do?”
“This is no time to be making those kinds of jokes!”
“Jokes sub-lieutenant? This one makes no jokes. We should go.”
“We don’t know what’s going on out there, its not safe!”
It doesn’t matter human. The worse it is out there, the worse it is in here. The water just hasn’t boiled yet. At least out there we might be able to help.”
“Or die because we dot have pressure suits or radiation shielding, we should wait here, some one will come to us, tell us the situation.”
“What do you humans always say, fight the casualty? We need to go help them, not for them to help us. Either one of us could be the difference between loosing the ship and saving it.” 1476 flashed an angry red color as the texture of her skin got rougher wither her frustration, like semi dried blood in a plush carpet.
“It could also be the difference between us living and dying.”
“Large human, of middling rank, my life is short, we are told from the time we’re small enough to fit in the palm of your size medium hand, that we are disposable, it is our job to die attempting to fix the ship id need be, that your live are worth more than mine, and I should… how you say, fall on the blade? You strange, delicate vertebrates are so fragile. I’m amazed you lived long enough to build slaves out of the rest of the world to do your bidding.”
Flustered as if she had been lapped in the face she stammered “Slaves?”
“Is that not what I am to you, have I used the wrong word in your blocky language? Or the Kek and the AACR? Are they not slaves?”
“The Kek?”
“Do you not know?”
“I am aware of the AACR uplifting the Kek, I am surprised you know, it’s not strictly common knowledge.”
“Just because my intelligence is different, and distributed, does not mean it is lower, sub lieutenant.”
“Stop changing the subject.”
“I have changed no subject. Only told you that your rank is insufficient to deter me from doing my job, and that perhaps I can earn my release from this place in the process of doing this job, by dying in some new and strange way that entities of my kind should not know exists” The many arms of the octopus swirled but her mantle like the spinning clouds of a hurricane as she rotated in the weightlessness gripped the hatch with her suckers and wrenched it open, even as Sub lieutenant Valeria pushed off from the wall to try and stop her.
With the hatch flung wide open, and only another dark room beyond, no fire, no vacuum, no burning radiation came. The Octopus slunk through the gap her voice calling back “Alas we must keep working, for we are not dead.”
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The Descendant Saga 