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I want to tell you about a coincidence that isn’t one.
If you’re reading Defenceman: Parallel Ice right now, you just watched Michael Stewart’s season come down to St. Paul in April of 2011. Hold that month in your head for a second, because it matters more than it looks.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human opens in April 2011. The same month. While Michael is doing what Michael does on the ice, a man on Mars is standing in the cold in front of a flag with a single star ringed by eight smaller ones — a mourning flag — reading eight names off a metal placard, one at a time, the way he does every morning before the work begins. Refusenik’s readers will know exactly where that placard came from and who those names belong to. If you don’t yet, you will.
Two men who have never heard of each other, living through the same spring on two different worlds. That’s not a trick of scheduling. It’s the spine of the whole novel. Cold Human is built as a braid — three lives on one shared calendar — and the calendar is the thing quietly pulling them together while none of them is looking.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026. Only two more chapters left.
CCTW
Cold Creek built Michael Stewart across three books, and then the story stopped mid-stride. I wrote about that silence in my first post here, and I am not going to relitigate the grief. This post is about what I did with it, and where Michael goes next.
Defenceman: Parallel Ice exists for one purpose: to give Michael's collegiate story a proper close. Not to replace what Cold Creek made, but to carry the character to a finish line the original story never reached, so the next saga could start honestly. It is my own work and it is not canon, and I have been clear about that from the first chapter.
Here is what I can tell you about the handoff. The Vallis Defense: Cold Human picks Michael up within weeks of where Parallel Ice's final season ends. Same city, clan, and circle of people you have spent the past year getting to know. Everything he earned in this book, he carries into the next one. If you have read this far, you do not need the Companion Guide for his chapters. You are the Companion Guide.
And one promise about where his story goes. Early in the new book, AEGIS surfaces something in its own data that even Michael cannot explain. His part of this novel starts with that question, and I am not going to answer it here.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026.
CCTW
I have written about why I do this, who these three men are, and what they share. This is the plainest post yet. If you are deciding whether to start this novel when it launches, here is what you are weighing.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human is one story told in three voices. Waylon Eckermann, carried forward from Refusenik's Island Mine. Scott MacIntyre, from Human Phoenix / Man. And Michael Stewart, from Cold Creek's Defenceman series, by way of my own Parallel Ice. The book spans April 2011 to the summer of 2014, across three acts and roughly 90 chapters. One chapter a week, the same schedule you have followed for the past year.
The structure is a braid. Chapters rotate among the three men on a single shared calendar, so you feel what each is living through while the others are in motion. Waylon is building on Mars, Scott is courting Janie, and Michael is a very busy boy. None of them knows the others exist. The calendar does the patient work of drawing them together, and here is the part I love: if you are reading Defenceman: Parallel Ice right now, you are already inside the story. Its closing chapters and the opening of Cold Human happen weeks apart. You will recognize the season.
What drives it is what drove the originals: loyalty, friendship, chosen family, and the slow work of building something that lasts. Sport and science fiction are the setting, not the point. The threats are real, but they stay where they belong, at the edges. They do not define the world, or these men. The story writes toward the light.
What I owe you, my patient and generous readers, is a story that honors the past while taking these characters places some of you, though perhaps not all, will appreciate. That is the risk of any continuation, and I hope you will enjoy the journey. I write this because I love the work, and because I love hearing from you.
If you are new to any of the three worlds, I have prepared a Companion Guide to publish alongside the novel: summaries of the source books and a character and location codex, enough to walk in cold. That said, the originals are better than any guide I could write, so I strongly encourage you to read Cold Creek and Refusenik directly. They are the reason this story exists.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026.
CCTW
Cold Creek and Refusenik never met, as far as I know. They write in different genres years apart. One builds a hockey story, the other a science fiction saga. On paper, they have almost nothing in common.
I have spent a long time now living inside both their worlds, and I think they are writing about the same man.
Cold Creek gives us Michael Stewart. A Defenceman whose decency is never mistaken for softness, who takes his life off and on the ice seriously, and keeps earning his next chapter by staying true to his moral compass. By any measure, Michael could have become the entitled athlete and showboat. The successful hockey star, the international male model, the tech guru: any one of those would turn most people insufferable. He never does. He always tries to lift the people around him rather than make them smaller for his success.
Refusenik gives us Waylon Eckermann and Scott MacIntyre. A Navy man who builds a nation, and a Marine who runs a bar in West Texas and wants nothing more than Janie's love and to be a good man. Neither of them performs competence, and yet they are the most capable people in any room.
That is the thread. All three stay below the radar by choice, not by limitation. Each of them could take up more space, and each chooses to avoid the spotlight. Waylon and Scott share military service, while Michael, a civilian, shows the same commitment to others in his every action. All three have an innate understanding of duty, and a habit of putting others above themselves. They help their friends because that is who they are. The principle is the engine, not the performance.
That is rarer than it sounds. Cold Creek and Refusenik both ask the harder question: what does a good man do when his life grows beyond anything he planned for?
When I started writing The Vallis Defense, I assumed I was beginning from separate universes that I would somehow have to merge. I was mistaken. Scott, Waylon, and Michael are never that far apart. Put the three of them together and they know each other within minutes, because two writers who value integrity build the same sort of man.
That recognition is why this book exists. Not the plot, but that these three belong in one story, and always did.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes, in July 2026.
CCTW
Last time I wrote about why I do this. This time I want to introduce the men the new novel follows.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human has three protagonists who do not know each other.
Waylon Eckermann, sovereign of Free Vallis on Mars, a Navy veteran. Refusenik's readers will know him from Island Mine. The novel opens in April 2011, several years after the Chinese attack that put him on Mars, with Waylon reading the eight names on a placard beside a mourning flag with eight added stars.
Scott MacIntyre from Levall, West Texas. Marine veteran, scout sniper, bar owner. Refusenik's readers will know him from Human Phoenix and Human Man. The novel finds him in 2011 running a bar called the Black Horse, with a colorful group of friends and a new fiancée at his side.
Michael Stewart. Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Michael Stewart Cold Creek built, a few years on from where the Defenceman series left him. Readers of Defenceman: Parallel Ice will see how he has matured. AEGIS is growing, old relationships are still close, and new ones are about to walk in.
Three men, three worlds about to collide.
The Vallis Defense: Cold Human launches after Defenceman: Parallel Ice concludes in July 2026. More soon.
One last thing, unrelated to the novel. Michael Loucks, one of the best and most prolific writers on Stories Online (SOL), is leading a discussion called "Use of AI (nuances)" that is worth reading if the topic interests you. Wherever you land on the use of AI in writing, what stands out is the civility of the discourse. Opinions get expressed, ideas exchanged, and people listen to each other without belittling. This is what makes SOL special.
CCTW
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