by Patricia Stewart | Nov 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Jupiter’s Cup is the most famous and most prestigious graviton propelled regatta in the solar system. Graviton sailing enthusiasts were particularly excited this year because of the rare celestial positioning of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Each gas giant was located at the apex of an equilateral triangle. This configuration, in combination with the Sun’s overpowering gravity well, was ideal for racing Graviton Propelled Sailing Ships (GPSS). The four billion mile regatta starts at Jupiter, loops around Saturn and Uranus, and then finishes at Jupiter approximately a week later.
By convention, the ships are required to be single hull Dalton Spaceyachts, with a Newtonian “mainmast” mounted on the waist deck. Newtonian mainmasts are rigged with four graviton lugsails. The lugsails are arranged in a tetrahedral, that is, each of the four lugsails is oriented exactly 109.47 degrees from the other three. The lugsails project extremely large (one million square mile, maximum), invisible, teardrop shaped force fields into space that are designed to “catch” the gravitons, and/or antigravitons, associated with astronomical bodies. The beauty of this technology is that each of the lugsails can be targeted to the characteristic exchange particles from a specific astronomical body. For example, by targeting the Alpha-sail to Jupiter’s antigravitons, and the Beta-sail to Saturn’s gravitons, the ship will be pushed by Jupiter, and pulled by Saturn, achieving tremendous velocities. For additional propulsion, or for navigational control, the Gamma and Delta-sails can be targeted to other bodies, such as the sun, a moon, or another distant planet. Under the optimal conditions, a skilled crew could achieve velocities of over 30 million miles an hour.
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There are few moments in a GPSS race that are more stressful and strategically more important than the start. The nine ships in the regatta were jostling for position in the gap between the orbits of Ganymede and Callisto. The SS Vigilant held position near Ganymede’s western hemisphere, electing to take advantage of the moon’s greater mass. Some ships chose to take advantage of Callisto’s more distant orbit, which was almost a million miles closer to Saturn. Others meandered between the orbits of Ganymede and Callisto, trying to build up kinetic energy, rather than potential energy. Although risky, they could get both, if they guessed the time of the starting signal correctly.
The Vigilant’s Navigator and Tactician carefully watched the sensor data, mentally keeping track of the other eight ships, and the exact locations of the four Galilean moons. Even distant Io could provide an additional antigraviton boost if the start of the race was delayed by an hour. The Helmsmen stood at the controls ready to adjust the ship’s course at a moments notice. The Grinders and Trimmers were at their stations awaiting the command to deploy and/or modulate the graviton sails. The Skipper stood proudly in the center of the main deck with his hands clasped comfortably behind his back. He smiled with anticipation as he looked out the forward viewport. As he watched, a fourth “star” suddenly appeared in the Hunter’s Belt in the Orion constellation; it was the flare signaling the start of the race. “Inertial dampers on full,” he ordered. “Execute the sprint, Mr. Burton.” The Skipper reached out and grabbed the handrail to steady himself against the upcoming forward surge.
“Aye-aye, Skipper,” replied Burton as he signaled the crew. The Vigilant leaped from Ganymede’s clutch as it accelerated outward toward its eventual rendezvous with the distant ringed planet. At present, the Vigilant was behind the other ships, but she was quickly closing the gap.
by submission | Nov 24, 2008 | Story
Author : Jared R. Cloud
The General and the Secretary of State sat in the Oval Office, waiting for the new President to return from the bathroom. Although both had jumped in their seats when they first heard him vomit, he was on his third or fourth round now, and they were no longer startled by the sound. Finally, his stomach empty, the President walked out of the bathroom and sat down behind his desk without meeting his visitors’ eyes.
When he had composed himself, he looked up. “Pardon me. Something I ate didn’t agree with me, I suppose.”
The Secretary of State, a lifelong diplomat, nodded his head. “Of course, Mr. President.”
The General, who had been promoted for her victories in the field, not her skills at Pentagon politics, kept her silence.
“Just so I’m sure I understand the situation,” the President said, “can you give it to me again?”
The General stood up. The PowerPoint projector was still running and connected to her laptop. She quickly scanned through the slideshow until she came to the summary slides at the end.
“The alien spacecraft that took up orbit around the Earth eight months ago was, we now know, simply a scout. At the time, your predecessor questioned whether a ship of that size, with a crew of only three beings, was stable enough to make the trip through interstellar space without support.”
“Fine. I’ll call the old man first thing in the morning and apologize for all of the nasty things I said about him during the campaign. Skip to the part where the mothership shows up and the captain starts making demands.”
“Not just the captain of a ship, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said. “The linguists we’ve had working on the language tell me that the word is closer in meaning to ‘king.’ Or ‘queen.’”
“Maybe you’re wrong about what the damn thing wants?”
The Secretary of State said, “We’re pretty confident, Mr. President. They think there’s something special up there, and they want it for themselves.”
“The ship’s defenses?” The President asked, pleading.
“The results from our one attack showed it to be impervious even to nukes, Mr. President,” the General said.
“And if they win, they’ll just take it? How?”
Nobody had an answer.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. President. It’s time for your jiu-jitsu lesson.”
The General arched an eyebrow. “Jiu-jitsu, sir?”
“Taekwondo every morning. Judo every evening. Other martial arts in the afternoon, for variety.” The President stood to leave. “I’ve had to delegate most duties to the Vice President. He’s going to sit in this chair soon enough.”
The General and Secretary of State stood up as well. “Have a good lesson, Mr. President.”
The President smiled sadly. “It isn’t fair, is it? I mean, they could’ve told us before the election.”
#
The President enjoyed the light lunar gravity more than he thought he would. Alone as the aliens had directed, he felt strong and fast as he bounded into the airlock of the alien ship. His confidence seeped away when he realized how large the corridor was. He bounded unhappily into the amphitheater; he knew the seats were filled by aliens thrilling to see him or their own ruler die. War reduced to personal combat by the leaders of each side, and the President had — after the aliens had destroyed Lubbock as a demonstration — agreed. Win or lose, they’d promised to leave the Earth alone.
The alien king, twelve feet tall, entered the amphitheater. The President saw that he had claws.
The President wondered what nights would be like without the Moon.
by submission | Nov 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Alex Moisi
Maya knew that she was dying. You didn’t need to be a bio-mechanics expert to know that the nanoids inside her body were running out of energy. The climate and gravity of this remote planet were taxing the minuscule robots more than she had expected. Soon they would run out of energy, and without them her body would collapse on itself. She needed a booster shot, but there were no more. She had made sure of that when she set fire to her laboratory.
It was a shame, but it had to be done. She created the nanoids, dreaming of all the medical and engineering applications. But instead of doctors and scientists, the first to visit her were generals. They poked around with hungry glances, and kept asking the same questions.
“How soon can we give it to soldiers? How deadly can it make them? How dangerous?”
Call her an idealist, but she was sick of the endless wars. She knew where her research grant came from, but she had hoped the government would use the nanoids in hospitals. Slim chance. If it could kill someone, they would throw it onto the battlefield.
In the end she did the only reasonable thing. Looking back she felt a tinge of regret, maybe she had been stupid giving up on all those resources, the fame, the early retirement, but then again, she was sick of the air raid alarms and newscasts about another planet being destroyed, millions killed. A general promised to her, before leaving her laboratory busy with interns and robot researchers, that it will all be over when they will have this new weapon. But what if the enemy took a batch of nanoids for a dead body? What if everyone had super soldiers who could heal ten times faster, didn’t need spacesuits and could carry more weapons than a tank? Would it really be over?
“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked the lioness in front of her.
The metallic head didn’t move. It was nothing more than a statue composed out of various alloys and organic connectors, but soon it would be much more. Maya smiled. She knew they would search for her, they would trace the spaceship she used to escape and they would find the planet. Her creation was too important to ignore, too much was invested in the tiny nanoids.
“But you’ll take care of them, won’t you?” she said.
She did not expect an answer. The creature’s eyes were empty, although soon they would be filled with the flow of nanoids. In a robotic shell, her creations could survive for centuries, and Maya would make sure they were programmed to defend themselves.
“I would love to see how they react inside a mechanical body,” she murmured. Sadly it could not be helped; without the tiny robots the alien planet would kill her in an instant. But, alas, unlike destruction, creation always required sacrifice.
by submission | Nov 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
At four in the morning the alarms went off. Lois hardly stirred, but I went downstairs to the kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and then slogged my sorry ass to the control console, next to the laundry room.
Red lights glared from the temperature control panel. The needles showed an overtemp in the secondary thermocouple but normal temperatures in the primary, so I couldn’t tell if the relay was actually over-heating or if the secondary had failed again. I dialed down the master motor-control rheostat a couple of notches —losing precious speed— but the warning light didn’t go out, so instead of doing anything more I went to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and waited until dawn.
I spent most of the day under the home. Replacing the thermocouple dimmed the warning light but I could feel, just by a touch on its titanium casing, that the number three stepper motor was running much too hot. I took the motor offline and spent a few hours tightening and replacing coolant lines. I inspected the narrow yard-tall wheels on the rear outboard truck assembly and ended up replacing the bearings on two of the twelve wheels.
Around noon Lois came down the stairs, shook her head and grinned at me. “Come on up for lunch, Herb,” she said. It was a nice day, cool for summer, so we ate sandwiches and watermelon on the veranda.
After lunch I climbed to the roof, and in the strong midday sun I dusted off the solar panels and checked the alignment on the control linkage. I stood for a while admiring our new cupola, built a few weeks ago toward the front of the house. It was expensive, but Lois and I both believed the cupola completed our home.
Lois invited the Smiths from next-door over for supper. I grilled steaks on the patio while Bill Smith drank my beer and Lois and Dorothy Smith sat gossiping. “Nice cupola, Herb,” Bill said, gloating.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Sure,” Bill said. “That thing must weigh a couple tons.” Bill’s home had been inching past mine for the last year. He’d gained nearly half a house on me.
“Lois and I love the cupola,” I said.
“You should have gotten the high-performance relays instead. Like I did,” Bill said.
“I think the cupola is beautiful!” Dorothy said with a smile.
After the Smiths left we cleaned up, and I went to the control console and moved the master rheostat up a notch. No warning lights came on. The indicators showed that we’d moved a little less than thirty-three inches that day.
At dusk Lois and I climbed the stairs to the cupola. We opened the windows, let the breeze in. “Bill isn’t racing you, you know,” Lois said.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “The hell he isn’t,” I replied, and I kissed her.
From the cupola we could see the neighborhood as it stretched toward the horizon, each home moving at its own good speed. We were heading toward the sunset, the sky before us streaked with red and gold and salmon. I was happy.
From the cupola I could see that, from here, it was all down hill.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The bullet blistered past the right side of Stryker’s helmet, so close that for a good minute or so he was deaf in that ear before the pain gave way to a dull ringing.
“Stupid bastard,” he muttered under his breath.
The sniper he’d been tracking for the past few weeks was across the street, in another row of vacated low rises. Hiding in the rubble, clambering across broken rooftops and crawling through battered buildings, they were playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse.
The Sergeant, hugging the floor, crawled the length of the room and squeezed through a broken partition into an adjacent building.
It was his crew that cleared the way when they colonized this planet, before the locals decided to defy the company and separate. He’d fought hard for this rock, and he’d be damned if some dumb-ass villager with a rifle was going to stop him from keeping it under company control.
Stryker flattened himself against the back wall in the darkness, irising his goggles out full to capture every available lumen. Plucking a fist size chunk of rubble from the floor he tossed it sideways through the hole he’d just crawled through. There was the barest of whispers as a bullet split the air, but in the muffled muzzle flash he could make out the faint silhouette of the body coiled in the darkness behind it.
Very slowly he raised his weapon, pausing only to freeze and adjust the image in his heads up before squeezing off three rounds in a tight rising line.
Drop.
Breathe.
Without hesitation, Stryker crawled until he found a hole in the floor he could squeeze through, dropping silently into the room below. He ran, hurdling an empty window frame and raced across the vacant street. Slipping through a crumbling doorway he stopped. Above him, close by, he should find his wounded opponent.
It took an eternity to find a route to the second floor, and longer still to pick his way through the wreckage to the room in which the sniper had taken refuge. Stryker had shouldered his rifle in favour of a large bore handheld, the longer weapon unwieldy in close quarters. He could hear laboured breathing from outside the room, and though his weapon was at the ready, nothing could have prepared him for the child lying bleeding inside.
Only one of his shots had found its target, tearing a bloody hole in her torso. The rifle that had been so deadly accurate lay forgotten at an angle across her legs, the weapon nearly half as long as she would be tall. Her bare feet were calloused and bloody, her body lean and muscular but visibly undernourished. He couldn’t fathom how she’d managed to heft the weapon, much less kill a dozen of his unit with it.
Large tear filled eyes met his in the gloom.
He lowered his weapon, struggling over whether to try to save her, or put her out of her misery here. The lives she’d taken wouldn’t make it easy for her if she survived the trip back.
He was still undecided when he heard a round chambering beside his still ringing right ear.
“This is our rock,” the second woman stood just out of reach, face invisible beyond the gaping maw of the barrel leveled at his head, “you stupid bastard.”
