by Duncan Shields | Jan 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There is a clarity that comes with crisis, he thought, a simplicity that comes with emergency.
That’s why this movie night on a space station named Heron 6 pinned in the perihelion lagrange point between Triskus and Constantine became a sudden trial. There was a crack in the hull and there were eighteen of us. There were six life boats. Two to a boat equaled twelve. That left six people that would have to stay on the space station and die.
The chances of being holed in that part of space were very low and the ticket prices to this station were super cheap because of the poor safety measures.
We were all experienced spacers. We knew without speaking that the first to the lifeboats would survive. The movie, something hideously outdated from Original Earth, stayed cycling on the screen as we scrambled without language to the porthole irises of the lifeboat pods.
It was an interesting race. Jason and Tanya had my ankles at one point. I broke his nose with my foot. She let go when Jason’s blood got in her eyes in the zero gravity. None of us had weapons and we knew that if we were to detour to pick them up from the weapons locker, we would lose our chance to get to a pod.
The scramble was made more intense by the dropping temperature and air pressure. My ears popped and the cold numbed my extremities frighteningly quickly.
Peter shouldered past me with his larger frame and I careened over into the wall. I knew that I was going to die if I didn’t keep going but if I was panicking, I couldn’t feel it. I think that the entire group of us were experiencing what cattle in stampedes must feel, or rabbits trying to escape flooding warrens, or groups of people trapped in burning buildings. I scrambled forward through the thinning air, watching Peter receive a sharp elbow from Lorenz and double up, winded in the rapidly declining atmosphere. He floated back past me.
The whole race for life must have taken two minutes but I remember it as a timeless extended moment bereft of clocks. I felt as if I joined the mindless fight for survival that every single living being has experienced. The chase to beat death with the certainty that there would be losers amongst your number.
I slammed into a life pod and Tanya slammed up against me. I struck out with my fist and hit the button to close the door. The doors shut and sealed loudly. The thuds of fists echoed on the outside. The thuds stopped after a minute.
Tanya must have clawed her way back to the forefront after our tussle. When she looked at me, breathing deeply of the emergency air supply gushing into the sealed lifepod and smeared with Jason’s blood from earlier, she smiled with the nervous, bright-eyed smile of animal triumph. There was no resentment of my earlier clash with her and Jason.
We held each other there and waited for help. It arrived seven hours later. We didn’t say a single word to each other in those hours. We shared the bond of beings that had survived a crisis. We were in a place beyond the usual banality.
The others that survived met up with us back in the rescue ship with sighs of relief and knowing nods and tears over who we had lost but beneath it all was a joy. A completely placid, guilt-free aspect of gene-deep peace. I still remember that.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This is the best of all possible worlds. Or so the time-travelers tell us.
They have given their future away to make our present the best it can be.
They gave science a good, healthy goose early on around the Babylonians times. They killed the despots in their cribs over the millennia.
This is the land of perfect, near-immortal bodies and technology that borders on magic.
Every morning, they publish newspapers on the feeds. They’re the newspapers that would have been printed in the unaltered world. We all remember the picture of the Hindenburg and followed with great interest the antics of the World War Two issues. Every day there’s a new issue and every day we’re reminded how lucky we are. We’d never even had a small battle!
The ideas in the pages fascinate us but repulse us at the same time. This new present is obviously better than the one given to us in the papers.
Late at night, I dream of presidential elections, mass slaughter, ‘economies’ and death at 90. I wake up terrified and then immediately relieved that it was all a dream.
God bless our time-traveling saviors.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This planet’s dominant life was insectile and large. A special breed of ranch-hand was needed.
Jake was a milliboy.
The millipede was as big around as a tree trunk, bright red and armoured. The saddle looked ridiculous on such a creature but it served its purpose. It kept Jake astride his steed.
Jake and a few hundred others worked this ranch. Breaking in the tranchlas, the kaydids, the scorps juners, skeeters, and the jackflies. Wasn’t one insect a body could trust, the earthers said. It just wasn’t in the creatures. They operated on a completely emotionless level. You couldn’t build up a rapport with them.
Jake and the other milliboys would beg to differ on that point.
“You spend enough time around the ‘sects,” Jake and the milliboys said, “you get to know the way they think, what the twitch of a leg means, the angle of one of those huge multifaceted eyes. The ‘sects know you’re watching. They learn to avoid pain.”
Jake’s mount was addicted to meth. It was easy to make around here. The millipedes were the easiest to hook, easiest to train, and damn near impossible to kill. Those pincers up front underneath that bulbous, eyeless face could cut a prayer in half or so they say. Slow movers but they never turned on their riders after they had been broken in and hooked on the drug.
Penelope was breaking in a mantis. Only the girls could work the mantii. The milliboys just got their heads nipped off when they tried. With the pheromones in the air, the female mantis could tell that it was a problem of dominance, not survival. A contest of will. There were dozens of species of mantis. They made up half of the planet’s population. Mantis-breaker girls were in demand. Prayers, they were called.
Penelope hadn’t lost one yet. She was there, hat in hand, whooping as the mantis bucked, kicking up fantails of brown dirt. Penelope had a hold of the wings with her legs and she was smiling from ear to ear, freckles dotted on her red cheeks.
After a long time, the mantis calmed down and knelt. The contest was over.
“Well, hell. I think this’ll be my new mount.” She said and slapped her knee after dismounting, laughing as she walked over to Jake.
“You always were a firecracker, Pen.” Jake said, smiling underneath the brim of his hat.
“How much money you got in that mouth of yours, Jake?” asked Pen. “I reckon I can break a hive queen before you can tomorrow.”
The other milliboys laughed. Jake stopped smiling. He squinted up at the two suns as if measuring something in the sky. He looked back at Penelope. Everyone around them went silent.
“You’re on” said Jake, smiling again. She smiled back.
Around them, money started changing hands.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Trees lay flat behind the ship where it had crashed to the ground in the forest. Its silver shell winked in the sunlight, shuddering occasionally as whatever machinery inside of it quaked to a wounded stop. The hunter had seen nothing like it, not even on the newsfeeds. Maybe a new kind of experimental ship that had crash landed.
Setting his jaw firmly and readjusting the grip on his gun, he stepped forward towards the silent craft. The violence of the craft’s crash landing had ended. Squirrels resumed foraging, deer resumed grazing, and birds began their songs anew. The ship’s hull ticked as it cooled. The film of frost that had formed on it started to melt in the sun.
Through the largest crack in the dripping hull, the hunter could hear movement. A whispering shuffle that ended with a clank. The hunter knew the sound of a wounded animal when he heard it. He advanced to the crack with his gun ready. The alien inside the craft was probably close to death or stunned. The hunter walked slowly and softly towards the crack and peered into the gloom.
A silver whip of corded metal shot out from the crack and skated across the hunter’s cheek, laying it open. The hunter’s hands tensed in surprise and he emptied both barrels of the shotgun. A shower of sparks from buckshot ricochets lit up the interior for a second and the hunter clearly saw the alien life form.
It was like a metal octopus with many more tentacles. The tip of each tentacle ended in a specialized tip. The hunter had shot directly into its center of mass. The creature thrashed and lay still. It was a lucky shot. If the creature had integral organs there, it was almost certainly dead.
The hunter’s cheek buzzed. His right eye closed. He dropped his weapon. There was something in the cut on his face. He felt his heart race and a fever take over his body. He fell to his knees and the sun seemed to get brighter. His breathing came hot and fast. He passed out.
When he awoke, he felt refreshed. He brought his hand up to his cheek to find it healed. He felt the ridge of a scar. Judging by the position of the sun, it looked like about an hour had passed. He stood up, picked up his gun and went back to his cabin. In the morning, he’d go into town and report what he had found. Right now, though, he was exhausted and thirsty.
It didn’t occur to him until he got back to his cabin that he knew exactly how to build a metal octopus and spaceship. Chemistry beyond his education unspooled in his mind. Mechanical processes popped through his mind. He’d need to invent the tools needed to create the compounds necessary to make the chemical chain reactions that would result in the hardest bonds in the new metal. There were no names for what he was thinking about, just clarity and pictures. The memories of the alien life form were there as well. He couldn’t access them but he knew they were there in a corner of his mind, waiting for download into the shell he now had the ability to create.
It would take six years and it would make him rich if he kept the goal of his projects secret. The patents would change the history of Earth.
The hunter looked at the mirror in the cabin’s bathroom as he prepared for bed. The scar on his cheek was silver.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 22, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
She was giving me a lecture and I didn’t like it. However she was the captain so I listened.
“If you go any faster than 2C, you start to travel backwards as you travel forwards. You get to your destination before you leave. That is impossible and it tears the ships apart. No one wants that. Light and a half. That’s the sweet speed when the universe stops. The universe slows once you go past the speed of light and stops completely at 1.5C. Now, the thing about navigating at C and a half is that you have to be traveling that fast to navigate.”
I’d just come back inside the ship. Yes, I was a first-year telengineer but she was so full of herself. I left the plate off of the forward buffer sails during the initial checklist. Big deal. There were seven thousand plates on the buffers. I knew it was my first mission and that she was in charge but her voice was really starting to make me wonder what it would be like to see some fear on her face. I don’t like that feeling.
“Are you listening? The entire universe becomes a three dimensional, unmovable photograph. Once you’re holding steady with the buffers keeping us at 0 in space but 1.5 at lightspeed, it’s possible to send out a pulse through the super strings. Y’know, like a bat. Do you know what a bat is?” she asked like a children’s show narrator. She waited for a reaction.
I nodded, glowering.
“A very accurate picture of the obstacles on your journey comes back to the ship. After that picture is analyzed, you can nudge the ship forward in space to 1.6C and the magic happens. You are transported to your destination milliseconds after you left. You see?”
She clapped her hands once to get my attention, raised her eyebrows and smiled at me sarcastically. I looked sullenly at the wrench in my hand and tightened my grip on it. I couldn’t take another ten minutes of her condescension.
“Do. You. Hear. Me?” she asked.
“Yes.” I answered. It was an effort not to shout it at her.
She stared at me.
“The buffers. Doing the impossible so that we can have an accurate picture of the universe at rest. That way, we can move when nothing else is moving. No asteroids, no suns, no DUST can get in our way or we will perish. We can look at the picture and then we can zip there instantly. Do you understand me? The BUFFERS.”
She was getting agitated. She grabbed my chin and looked into my eyes.
“You left a plate off of the forward buffer sails. We are not holding at zero C any more. According to my calculations, we are holding at 0.0000000001 C. Do you know what that means?” she asked.
“It’ll take a little longer for the computer to calculate a safe route before we turn the buffers off, I guess?” I retorted with a sneer.
“Yes.” She answered. I saw her bottom lip quiver. “Do you know how MUCH longer?”
“I don’t know, a few minutes?” I was already bored with this conversation.
“A year.” She said. “Or close to it. Three hundred and eleven days by my calculations.”
“What?” I whispered. I finally started to understand why she was so angry.
I looked at her dumbly. I could see tears forming in her eyes. It was going to be a long year.
