by Patricia Stewart | Nov 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“So, that’s him?” asked Benjamin Goldberg, the reporter from the World Post that was assigned to cover the Berlin Massacre.
“Yes,” replied Doctor Ludwig. “That’s the scum that brought the Procyon Virus to Earth. It’s killed twenty million people already. The casualty count will no doubt double before it’s over.” The two humans stared in disgust at the large biped reptile lying unconscious on the hospital bed. The interstellar war had produced plenty of fatalities when the fighting was confined to space, but when the Procyon High Council decided that it was acceptable to use biological weapons against Earth’s civilian population, the escalation of causalities was devastating. “What do you think the government plans to do with it?” asked the Doctor.
Goldberg noted that the doctor selected the pronoun ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ when referring to the creature. “Assuming HE lives,” Goldberg replied, “there will be a trial. It will be broadcast live to the entire quadrant. The damn Procyons will no doubt pick it up, and make this bastard into a planetary hero. The ironic part is that he’s just a mule they grabbed from the slums. He has no intelligence or military value whatsoever. A trial just gives us the right to execute him. Unfortunately, it’ll be great propaganda for the Procyons. It would have been better for us if he had died.” The reporter turned to the guard standing next to the bed. “How come you guys captured him alive? Couldn’t you have put a phaser hole in his head?”
“Sorry,” said the soldier. “As much as we wanted to, the Centauri Convention specifies that we must see to it that the wounded are collected and cared for. The wording is very specific, we cannot ‘willfully kill a prisoner.’ That’s what makes us better than them. Frankly, I wish it were dead too. That bastard killed my sister and her two kids. How about you doctor, can’t you turn off its respirator?”
“Unfortunately, no,” replied Doctor Ludwig. “The Hippocratic Oath, which I swore to uphold, says that ‘above all, I must not play God.’ That applies to all sentient life forms, not just humans.”
“Too bad,” reflected the soldier. Then, changing the subject, “If you think it’s safe to leave it unguarded Doctor, I need a cup of coffee and a cigarette.”
“With 50 milligrams of Medetomidine in it, it’s not going anywhere. Come on, we’ll join you. My treat,” suggested the Doctor.
As the three humans walked down the hallway toward the cafeteria, Goldberg said, “Crap, I left my notes in the room. I’ll be right back.” Goldberg jogged back to the room and grabbed his notepad. He paused over the alien and thought about how he had hoped that this story would win him a Pulitzer Prize. However, upon reflection, Goldberg decided that he didn’t want to become famous on the graves of so many of his fellow Earthmen. Nor did he want his reporting to help this lousy lizard become a Procyon demigod. On the other hand, there was the Journalists’ Code of Professional Ethics that said he ‘should report the story, not become part of it.’ “Ah Hell,” Goldberg finally said after coming to terms with his moral conflict, “We’ve been violating that oath for centuries. Why start now?” He reached over and flipped the respirator’s toggle switch to the “off” position. He waited long enough to make sure it had stopped breathing. Interesting, he realized. He had changed pronouns too. Then, with an uplifted spirit that he hadn’t felt in months, he strutted out of the ward to rejoin the others.
by Sam Clough | Nov 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
The Shian are a spacefaring race. They are both reasonably telepathic and fairly omniscient: they are also our allies. We – that is, the human race, nothing to do with me personally – built a machine that taps the same frequencies as a Shian biological relay, the natural structure which grants them their telepathy. Apparently, this surprised them. Shian ships blinked into existence all around the earth. They batted away the missiles and the more exotic close-orbit defences that we’d set up, secure in the knowledge that we honestly didn’t know any better. They learnt the language, set up an embassy, and started paying attention to us, in much the same way a teacher pays especial attention to a particularly precocious child.
The Shian were obviously better than us. It wasn’t long before they set us up on the interstellar scene, putting us in touch with their other contacts.
This helped our growing racial inferiority complex no end.
Out of all the contacted species, humanity is physically the least imposing, the shortest lived, and has the dullest senses. We’re not especially bright. In our own sphere, we are a match for most of the minds out there. But as soon as the higher-order physics that the Shian dabble in are brought to the table, our best scientists are suddenly like mewling kittens: confused, worried and scared.
The only thing we seem to have going for us is a certain adaptability and a capacity for survival. Naturally, we wouldn’t need those traits if we could put a one of those automated nomad manufactories in orbit. Or if we had a functional Shian dark drive to reverse-engineer. Or even a working nanoforge. That’s the butt of a lot of jokes in the commercial sectors, I tell you – every damn species seems to get a kick out of our inability to create and stabilise nanomachines.
If you ever see a Nomad on a refuge base, watch them closely. They walk with a kind of jerking shudder. Now, you need to see them in a nonhuman environment to know that the jerk-shudder isn’t just the way they walk. I eventually figured it out. It’s the way they laugh. Our all-environments, everything-proof, top-of-the-line-in-every-field bases are a running joke.
And of course, every species is guaranteed a permanent patent on every one of their native technologies. Not that humanity has much that needs protecting. All the patents mean is that we can only afford to lease extraterrestrial techs, rather than licence them outright.
Anyway. I was making a regular cargo run between Asylum and Third Eye, both of which are human-administered refuge bases in the thin strip of space between the Ekkt and Shian polities. Now, I’m used to working with Shian lossless drives: they work, every time. The junker that I had been assigned was a retrofit. An old Shian Swifthull with a native terran jumpdrive.
Shian propulsion tech is of somewhat superior quality to ours. Shian drives tend to jump the whole ship, rather than just the drive section.
Drifting on my own, with the atmosphere slowly leaking from my capsule, I finally began to get the joke.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m thinking of my daughter LaHayne and the upcoming marriage. It’ll be her third.
Her other two husbands have met the new fiancee and they like him. They’ll all live together in a series of connected apartments in the cave wall. Modest, but it was all I could afford.
My daughter is beautiful, though, and intelligent in conversation. That afforded me some generous dowries from the suitors. As always, I let her pick but I crossed my fingers and hoped that she would be practical as well as young. She surprised me with her choices but in the end, she showed me that she is already much smarter than her father.
I am Ethan. I am a ferryman. This planet named Orin-ra is a solid ball of cold dense rock. Valleys of mile-deep clefts vein the surface of Orin-ra like a shattered billiard ball that’s been glued back together. The bottoms of these cracks have rivers and cloud systems and heat. The tops of these cracks touch the sky where the air becomes too thin to breathe.
We humans live in these cracks. We live on the vertical. We carved tunnels into the sides of the chasms and moved in. The colony ship had a vast array of things that struggling colonies might need including hunting and fishing implements and scouting vehicles.
We pulled flying animals out of the air to ride and for food and clothing. We ate and harvested the flowering lichen that carpeted the walls. And we pulled up the giant aquatic animals from the depths.
After eating the meat from the inside of these chasm-whales, we filled their skins with air. They became giant dirigibles. They became ferries.
I pilot one of them. I am a ferryman. There are lots of these slow moving taxis that traverse the world. We are the system of transit for getting from one clifftown to another.
The younger folk like to capture the smaller flying animals and ride them. They’re faster but they’re more dangerous and can only take a few passengers depending on their size. Pterries, they’re called.
Our ferries are larger, safer and can take freight.
Like Hindenberg airships from Old Earth but with fins and wide dead eyes. It has a fire in its hollow belly that I can control by letting more air in through the gills or letting some air out from the back. I can wave its giant rear tails to slowly push us forward through the humid night air.
Miles of air below us and cliffs on either side. Our entire culture is caught between a rock and a hard place.
I get to go home every few weeks and see my lovely daughter and her husbands. I’ll be going back soon to see her third wedding. There are more men than women here since some sections of the colony ship were damaged on landing. The numbers are starting to even out and the scientists say that in another few generations we’ll have a more stable genetic base for this society.
The rules are going to change when that happens. My daughter is valued, protected and special right now. All our daughters are. Women are in the minority here. They need to be treated with reverence. They hold the key to the future. They are treated like goddesses that walk among us. There will be a day when women are common here and valued less.
I’m glad I’ll be dead by then.
by submission | Nov 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Davidson
“Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!”
I couldn’t stop my head from repeating that over and over and over again. Every time I tried to reboot my thought processes, all I managed was a brief “I don’t freakin believe this”, before returning to my yoga-like mantra.
I probably came close to driving off a cliff half a dozen times before survival instinct kicked in and I pulled over to the side of the road. At some point I remembered to swallow and realized that I must have mouth breathing like a marathoner; it took four or five tries before I worked up enough saliva to do anything more than choke.
I knew the mountains of New Hampshire were famed for their UFO encounters. I also knew how much hooey they all were. Welcome to hooey land.
Lighting up the undersides of the overcast and rivaling the full moon in intensity was an honest to goodness saucer. Flying. Or hovering. Or doing something that wasn’t typical of any flying object I was even remotely familiar with.
I wasn’t scared, just blown away. Then I did get scared. The damn thing started sliding down the sky, lower and lower. I wasn’t sure but, yes. It WAS closer to where I sat on the shoulder of a mountain road.
I decided to take one shot with my cell phone and then get the hell out of there. But I’d forgotten to bring the phone with me. And the car wouldn’t start.
“Hah!” I laughed out loud, more bravado than amusement. “What’s next? Lost time? Probing? Sexy alien females who want to have my baby?” Even the last I could do without if the damned car would start, but no such luck.
So I sat there and watched a flying saucer land in the middle of the road about fifty feet away Cute little articulated tripedal landing legs unfolded from its underside. A ring of winking lights circled it at its widest point. It touched down onto the macadam, the landing legs sagging and then springing taut as they took up the weight.
A door slid open and a ramp lowered to the ground. A creature appeared silhouetted against the saucer’s interior lights and then descended the ramp. It walked in my direction.
I flooded the engine. You’re not supposed to be able to do that with electronic fuel injection, but I managed. I could smell the gasoline as the thing in a silver spacesuit stepped up to the driver’s side door.
It was humanoid. Two legs. Two arms. Two hands. A body and a head covered in an opaque silver helmet.
It made a rolling motion with its hand, like cops do when they want you to roll down your window. I was on the edge of panic but the gesture was so familiar I decided not scream right then. I could always try to hide in the glove compartment later.
I rolled down the window. The creature leaned down. I could see my face reflected in its helmet. My mouth was still open.
“Do you know how fast you were going?” it asked. Then it laughed.
When I came to, it was gone.
by submission | Nov 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Jeremy M. Hall
“Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen of Third Platoon, Alpha Company, Harod’s Harriers, ” Sergeant Major Clarkson intoned, “you have become the official guinea pigs for the outfit. If you look at the table in front of you, you will notice that there is a new weapon. This weapon will hopefully become your next best friend. You have permission to pick up the weapon and carefully examine it. One of the first things that you will notice is that there is no ammo clip and only one outlet. That outlet leads to a nanofactory, which will turn anything into a projectile. Our illustrious leader has decided that you are going to field test these on your next mission. Briefing is in ten minutes.”
*
Like most missions that Harod sends her troops on, it didn’t take long for it to go up the “shit creek,” even though it was a simple convoy escort mission. Third Platoon was Tail End Charlie, following the client’s last vehicle from the mission approved distance; in some ways it’s the worst position because you have to watch front, sides and back. Something jumped into the midst of the convoy, bounced up in the air, and exploded.
“Bouncing Betty!” the driver screamed, skidding to a stop next to the remains of a damaged vehicle. Third poured out of the transport, setting up a perimeter around the wreckage amidst the onslaught of the ambush precipitated by the bomb.
They looked at their guns stupidly as nothing happened when they pulled the triggers.
“You have to load them, Dumbasses!” Clarkson yelled over the din.
There was a collective “Oh!” as Third scrambled at the ground, picking shit up off the ground. Dirt, rocks, sticks, debris, and anything else at hand were shoved into the barrels of the new-fangled weapons. The troopers were immediately rewarded with a green light, and they did what they were trained to do: shoot anything that moved outside the perimeter, with spectacular effect. The streams of bullets were different depending on what was shoved in the barrels, with metals giving off a nice green, also taking on armor-piercing characteristics; carbon based matter rewarded a purple projectile, but also doing much better as anti-personnel rounds; silicates created a yellow round, but wasn’t as good as metal or carbon rounds. Third quickly started experimenting with materials.
What had started as a simple ambush became a pitched battle. The enemy poured more and more troops into the area, trying to destroy the Harriers, as they tried to recover the injured and supplies from the damaged vehicles, as per the contract. While the Harriers had always exercised good firing discipline, something every infantryman faces during protracted engagements is the shortage of ammunition. Except for Third Platoon; if anything they were having fun at the expense of the attackers.
“Hey Bucher! Watch this!”
A stream of fire belched from the end of Migola’s rifle, streaking out and setting an ambitious ambusher on fire.
“What in the Hell did you load in that thing?”
“Finally have a use for rations.”
“Which one was it?”
“The Goulash.”
“Remind me to re-label those as ammunition. They were inedible anyways.”
