Windswept - Adam Rakunas

Windswept - Adam Rakunas



Padma Mehta has to save her city, her planet, and Occupied Space from a devastating crop-killing plague — all before Happy Hour.

Labor organizer Padma Mehta is on the edge of space and the edge of burnout. All she wants is to buy out a little rum distillery and retire, but she’s supposed to recruit 500 people to the Union before she can. She’s only thirty-three short. So when a small-time con artist tells her about forty people ready to tumble down the space elevator to break free from her old bosses, she checks it out — against her better judgment. It turns out, of course, it was all lies.

As Padma should know by now, there are no easy shortcuts on her planet. And suddenly retirement seems farther away than ever: she’s just stumbled into a secret corporate mission to stop a plant disease that could wipe out all the industrial sugarcane in Occupied Space. If she ever wants to have another drink of her favorite rum, she’s going to have to fight her way through the city’s warehouses, sewage plants, and up the elevator itself to stop this new plague.

Praise for Windswept:

“Like all the best speculative fiction set in the future, Windswept is also about the way we live now, and Adam Rakunas tackles what matters most with a metric ton of humor and heart. A promising, thrilling debut.”
- Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World

“Lush and exotic, Rakunas’s Windswept is like the booze that powers his world: a delightful cask aged añejo rum that keeps revealing greater complexity and depth the more time you spend with it. I didn’t realize I had been lacking rum-running space opera in my life, but after Windswept, I definitely have a thirst for more.”
- Mark Teppo, Author of Earth Thirst and co-Author of The Mongoliad