Battle Moves

by Duncan Shields | Feb 6, 2008 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The housing of my pilot node rang with impact. I snapped out of my reverie and watched the six targets arc away from either side of my display. Missiles away. My helmet was crooked but I didn’t dare let go of the sticks for a second until I was sure I was in the green.

I wasn’t dead so I fired back. It’s amazing how much of war’s battles could be encapsulated in that single sentence.

Small flowers bloomed kilometers away from me in the desolation. No impacts.

My breathing was ragged. Something must have been damaged in the last attack because it was rapidly getting much too hot in the cockpit. No sensors were whining and hull integrity seemed stable but I was coated with battle sweat.

The six targets looped around. Panic-stricken, I watched their icons hit their apex of retreat and then start to enlarge as they returned for attack run number six.

Immediately the grid flashed up on my screen and the stars blotted out. The enemy ships became red triangles. My targeting comps clacked into life like overactive children.

I could only count four triangles.

I took my hands off the sticks and adjusted my helmet with a sigh. Two unaccounted targets could only mean one thing.

The housing of my pilot node rang again as one half of it pounded inwards, closing on my leg. I screamed as the alert beacon drowned me out.

My screen went to static and my stats came up.

I looked up in agony to the ceiling. Of course it was Andrea who opened the hatch. It just had to be the girl I had a crush on who was next in line. I had no kills, my leg hurt, I stank, and she didn’t even know my name.

I begged God to not let this time be the time that she remembered me.

Her large brown eyes looked down at me in amusement. She cocked her head. Her hair was just an inch longer than regulation but she hadn’t been reprimanded. Her scores were high. With the light shining behind her, she looked angelic.

“You okay soldier?” she asked with a mocking smile.

Later, in sick bay, I came up with about a dozen great replies to that question. All of them would have been better than the answer I stammered back.

“Uh, yeah. I guess.”

Mutiny

by Duncan Shields | Jan 21, 2008 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I looked at the dashboard with a mounting fear.

The mutiny had gone off and turned messy. The company pilots had been killed when we blew the cockpit door. We’d had to execute our hostages. The airlock was empty now and their inside-out, frozen corpses goggled wide-eyed thirty AUs behind us.

In the not-here of throughspace, I could imagine the feel of passing wind rattling the portholes. I could almost feel the gentle slap of the ocean against the hull even though we were galaxies away from any planet with an ocean. There was nothing, of course, but the silent dimensionless void outside of the windows.

The temperature gauges said that it was both way above and way below tolerable in the vacuum outside. There were other contradictory readings. It was all that I could read.

No one had really mapped throughspace. It got us from place to place but ships that had applied the brakes had either exploded or disappeared entirely. We had to settle for what our instruments told us as we rocketed through.

We knew how to manipulate doors in and out of it but the real essence of what we were traveling through in throughspace was a mystery. Much like gravity in the old days. It could be measured and predicted but the ‘why’ of it was always elusive.

We were halfway through the trip and we had another sixteen hours to go before arrival in hostile territory. We might be able to bluff our way through a patrol or two but once the word gets out, we won’t be able to hide. We’d never be able to stand up to a full search, either. If we got boarded, there would be a firefight.

So here I was. We’d won the fight, struggling up from the prison deck and into the crew quarters. We were vagabonds now, treasonous savages who had killed their captors. Our entire reason for living right now was flight from the enemy and the finding of a safe haven.

All good except for one thing. Pilots spoke a different language than us. They had a verbal shorthand that had developed over time into its own separate dialect. I never really understood why until now.

Several hundred buttons, brightly lit with a Christmas tree rainbow of colours, stared up at me. There were dials, switches, slots, and knobs. A library of discs and glow-cards were stacked on either side.

There was no main stick or pedals.

The pilots in our holding cell, the ones on our side, they had been killed in the mutiny.

No one was left on our victorious team that had the ability to pilot a ship. One wrong button could make the ship try to stop or turn and kill all of us. We had no choice but to hope that the ship was on some sort of autopilot and that we’d be able to do some trial and error guesswork once we got through to other end.

The pictograms and symbols on the dashboard were alien and unintelligible. We could just as easily open a hailing frequency as we could fire a missile pulse if we started pressing the buttons randomly.

From below decks, I heard cheering and carousing. I dreaded taking the subleaders aside and telling them the news.

Legionnaire

by Duncan Shields | Jan 3, 2008 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

With lost marbles over mixed drinks, I stare at the face reflected in the oak bar. It looks more real to me, somehow, than I feel.

The bartender comes over to me. His huge moustache is waxed to slippery perfection. He looks down at me with crossed arms and a scowl. I know what that means. Time to pay up and leave.

I look up at him. I smile to let him know that I’m alright. The mirror behind the bar shows me that I’m a clown with wide rubbery lips smiling an idiot’s smile. The five-o’clock shadow on my face has turned into a two-in-the-morning carpet.

I’m having trouble balancing on the wide stool that I’m on. He doesn’t even need to say it. The bartender’s right. I’m done for the night.

I reach back to get my wallet. It takes five tries. He’s patient.

I pull out my credit card and lay it on the bar. The bartender picks it up and carries it over the credit card machine. The last half inch of my martini is trying to keep the bottom of the olive damp.

I try to fish the olive out of the glass but I fumble. The glass skips away and falls over, spilling the last little bit of gin onto the bar.

“Oh Jesus, Danny!” I hear from the end of the bar. I recognize the voice. I look up from licking the gin off of the bar to see what the problem is.

It’s the bartender again. He’s looking straight at me. I wonder why he’s doing that until I remember than my name is Danny and he’s probably found a problem with my credit card.

He comes back and puts the card down with the receipt. It’s gone through just fine. Of course it had. This is the magic card given to me by the government after the war. It never runs out. I was determined to drink the treasury dry.

I bring my other arm, the heavy one, up with a clank onto the bar. Its jagged shapes are cornered with rubber to prevent it from scratching furniture or people. Its barrel has been filled and plugged, never to fire again.

It’s too wired into my head to be removed, they said, and this credit card is their apology.

“You can’t lick the bar, Danny. You know that.” The bartender says and shakes his head.

”But….I shpilled.” I explain, amazed at the thickness of my own tongue.

“Come on, Danny. You can’t stay here. Go on. Get out. See you tomorrow morning.” Said Danny, not unkindly.

I stand up, aim for the door and walk outside. It takes five tries. He’s patient.

I fall over with a crunch of glass into the garbage in the alley behind the bar. I smell limes. I don’t get up.

Home Sweet Home. I’m enjoying the freedom I fought to preserve.

I’ve drunk enough that the faces of the screaming children in a country far away won’t wake me up. That’s the theory, anyway.

I close my eyes.

Spider

by Duncan Shields | Dec 25, 2007 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Susan crept downstairs slowly, curious about the noises she was hearing from the kitchen. The lights weren’t on. It was Christmas morning so it was still dark out at five in the morning. Her parents slept far away from the kitchen all the way upstairs on the second floor plus they had been celebrating last night so they were in a deep sleep. Susan, of course, had barely been sleeping at all. Her eyes had flown open at every little creak of the house settling. She kept a sensitive child’s ear out for the sound of sleigh bells or hoofbeats.

Neither of those sounds was coming from the kitchen. It almost sounded like burglars. The lights were off and all she could hear was the slight tinkling of what sounded like cutlery. Every now and then, it sounded like the fridge was gently being pushed forward a few inches.

As she got closer to the kitchen, there was the sound of sparks. The half inch of darkness underneath the closed door lit up bright blue like night-time television and then went black again. The clinking and the gentle scraping continued.

Susan was not a fearful child but she was getting nervous. She chewed on her lower lip with wide-eyed indecision. The contest in her between wanting to see Santa and wanting to alert her parents to possible intruders was violent but brief. She opted for the Santa glimpse.

Very, very quietly she opened the kitchen door a crack, pushed her arm through, and felt for the light switch on the wall. She found it. Light flooded the kitchen.

The sounds continued.

Susan opened her eyes.

It wasn’t Santa.

There was a giant long-legged metal spider on the kitchen table eating the toaster. It was like a black skinless patio umbrella with a streamlined teardrop-shaped blob of metal at the center of it the size of a microwave oven. Its mouth parts were gingerly tearing away the chrome skin of the toaster. It hissed a little and the blue sparks came again from its mouth as a perfect square of the toaster’s hide came away and disappeared into the maw.

Susan stood frozen to the spot. The spider didn’t know she was there.

Wrapping paper still clung to the spider’s legs. There was a colourful bow still smoking on the kitchen floor.

It didn’t have its light sensitivity sensors or earmikes installed yet so it had no idea that Susan was there or that the light was on.

Susan whooped with delight. Obviously her parents had set the time zone wrong and it had woken up early. She stroked the back of her hand to fire up her implant and snapped her fingers twice to set it to pet control.

The spider spasmed and fell on the floor with a crash. Susan could hear her parents waking up.

“Bad spider!” she said with a smile on her face. This was the best Christmas ever. Her friends were going to be so jealous.