by Patricia Stewart | Dec 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
During their first month on Mars, the two-man and two-woman crew made the most significant discovery in the history of mankind. While exploring the Grover Caves in the Scandia Tholi Mountains, they discovered irrefutable evidence of indigenous, but now extinct, intelligent life. The Caves turned out to be a complex underground city that had contained at least a million beings. Radiometric dating revealed that a civilized Martian society had flourished for thousands of centuries, but ultimately perished more than a billion years ago. Scientists concluded that as Mars’ metallic core solidified, the magnetic field disappeared, and the solar wind slowly, but relentlessly, blew the atmosphere into space, forcing the Martians underground. It was theorized that eventually their numbers dwindled, and their society became unsustainable. There was no archeological evidence that the Martians ultimately adapted, or that they had the technology to escape. Apparently, the Martians died along with their planet.
***
Dakota Dalton was driving the two-man Transportation Vehicle from the excavation site back to the base camp. Its treads kicked up two parallel red rooster tails as it trekked through the fine Martian dust. “Did you know today is Christmas?”
“I hope you’re not expecting a present,” replied Tom Barrymore. “The Mall is 100 million miles away. Besides, we’re in the middle of the Martian summer.”
“It’s summertime in Argentina too, and they’re celebrating Christmas. Com’on Tom, get in the spirit. We have so much to be thankful for. Look at that,” he said as he pointed to a bright blue-white point of light above the eastern horizon. “How can you look at the Earth and not feel…” Suddenly, the vehicle began to shake violently as the ground began to collapse beneath them. They tumbled a hundred feet into a subterranean cavern, landing upside down. Dakota found himself helplessly pinned under a heavy shipping crate. His probing fingers felt the sharp edges of his fractured right femur protruding through his coveralls. Tom was lying a few feet away. His neck was bent backward at a grotesque angle. Dakota could hear a hissing sound as air escaped from the pressurized vehicle.
A voice came from the radio. “This is Lowell Base,” said Jill Ignatuk, the mission commander. “We’re receiving an automated distress signal. Is everything okay? Hello? Dakota, Tom? Damn. If you can here me, we have your coordinates. We’ll be there in 90 minutes. Hang on.”
But even as Jill was talking, Dakota could hear the pitch of her voice change as the air in the transport became thinner and thinner. He wouldn’t last 90 minutes. Hell, he probably wouldn’t last 90 seconds. As the oxygen content dropped below critical levels, his vision began to fade as he was losing consciousness. There were flashes of light, blurry ghostlike images, then blackness.
When Dakota woke up at the Lowell Base infirmary he saw the commander’s smiling face looking down at him. Tom was standing next to her. “Commander,” Dakota asked, “how did you get to us so fast? I thought we were dead?”
“It took us over two hours to reach you two at the bottom of that hole. When we opened the airlock, you were laying side by side next to the hatch. There was blood on your uniform, but you didn’t have any wounds. When we got you both back to base, we took x-rays. Apparently, you had sustained a compound leg fracture, and Tom’s neck had been broken. How did you set your own leg, and treat Tom’s broken vertebrae?”
“It wasn’t me, Commander,” Dakota replied. “I have trouble putting on a Band-Aid.”
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
When Mati Forish was five years old, she could move coins across the table using only her mind. At ten, she could make small stones levitate. As a teenager, she could fly an aerocar from the back seat. Out of fear, Mati’s parents tried to stop her from using the power. It was the “Devil’s work,” they had said. But Mati knew that this gift could make her wealthy. And Mati wanted to be wealthy. When she turned twenty one, she left home to seek her fortune. While in the city, she met a doctor. He had understood her abilities, and said that he had “friends” that could help her achieve her goals, for the right price. Late one night, in a run down clinic on the south side, they implanted an experimental telekinetic booster into her brain. Astonishingly, it magnified her natural ability a thousand fold. Thrilled with the results, Mati rushed home to tell her fiance. But when she arrived, she found him in bed with another woman. In a fit of rage, she snapped both of their necks with her telekinetic power. And, to her surprise, she enjoyed it. That was the day that “The Assassin” was born. Over the next several decades, hundreds of people died at her will. It didn’t mater if the target was a tyrant or a saint. They were just paychecks to Forish.
***
(Circa 2067, Medellin, Colombia) After passing through security, Forish entered the auditorium from one of the rear doors and took an isle seat in the last row. She discreetly surveyed the auditorium to identify anything, or anybody, that could interfere with her task. It was probably an unnecessary precaution, since her mode of execution was undetectable, but if Forish was anything, she was meticulous.
Forish listened indifferently as several men on an elevated stage spewed their hateful political rhetoric in an effort to pique the intensity of the partisan crowd. After an hour of rabblerousing, Cattivo Guida, a ruthless and brutal dictator, marched onto the stage and stood behind the podium. Well it’s about time, thought Forish. She sat upright and eyed the target for several minutes trying to decide how she wanted to take him out. In a public venue such as this, it would be best to do it by either a heart attack, or brain aneurysm.
Forish began to concentrate on the task of focusing and modulating the psychokinetic synapses in her brain. Gradually, an invisible energy bubble began to coalesce above her head. She strengthened it and molded it. She willed a tendril to immerge from it and elongate toward the stage. The invisible tendril began to snake its way forward above the heads of the audience and across the stage. It entered Guida’s torso and slowly spiraled up his spinal column and wrapped itself around his heart. As Forish caused the tendril to contract slightly, Guida stopped speaking and clutched the sides of the podium. The tendril squeezed Guida’s heart tighter and he dropped to his knees. Tighter still, and his face contorted in agony as his eyes pleaded for someone to help him. Finally, he collapsed to the floor, motionless. Guida’s bodyguards rushed to his side. Their feeble attempts at CPR were wasted. Guida’s heart would not beat again.
As chaos and panic flooded the audience, Forish stood up, and calmly left the auditorium. Once outside, she walked down the marble steps and hailed a hovercab. “I’m famished,” she said to the pilot. “Take me to the best restaurant in the city.”
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Cephei A and Cephei B are eclipsing binary stars that are located approximately 3,000 light years from Earth. Cephei A is a supergiant that is currently the second largest star in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is so large that if it replaced Earth’s sun, its chromosphere would extend almost to the orbit of Saturn. Cephei B is no pipsqueak either. It is over ten times as massive as our sun, and over 100,000 times as luminous. Both stars have extremely elongated orbits that cause them to practically touch each other every twenty years as they whip around their celestial center of mass. During the close approach, the overpowering gravity wells of these two massive supergiants forms a localized space-time distortion between them. This previously unknown phenomenon is called a temporal vortex.
Twenty years earlier, during the previous close approach, Francisco Fontaneda discovered that the temporal vortex was not just a portal through time, as predicted by other scientists, but was actually the astrophysical equivalent to Ponce de León’s “Fountain of Youth.” His analysis of the Quantum-mechanical entanglement data collected during the brief formation of the vortex revealed that if a body passed through the vortex at the instant of closest approach, the body’s physiology would change by twenty years. In other words, it wouldn’t physically travel back in time, but it would emerge on the other side of the vortex 20 years younger. To his chagrin, this hypothesis was greeted with skepticism and ridicule by the scientific community. Unfortunately, his chance at vindication had to wait for the next transit, which wouldn’t occur for another twenty years.
***
Francisco Fontaneda sat in his spaceship meticulously going down the pre-flight checklist one item at a time. Fontaneda had spent the last ten years building his ship from scratch, making sure to only use parts that were at least twenty years old. He wanted to make certain that if his ship got younger too, the parts would have existed twenty years earlier; otherwise they might simply vanish. He was even wearing a thirty year old flightsuit. After all, he didn’t want the press to photograph him climbing out of his ship completely naked. Of course, that wouldn’t have been too bad, since he’d be a trim thirty year old, rather than his current flabby half century.
At the designated time, he fired his aft thrusters. The ship climbed above the A-B plane of the two supergiants, and began its slow parabolic plunge toward the coordinates where the 100 meter wide vortex would appear at the instant of closest approach. His timing was perfect. A swirling whirlpool of light and degenerate matter began to form a few hundred kilometers in front of the ship as he accelerated downward. Fontaneda held his breath as he entered, then exited, the temporal vortex. Momentarily blinded by the intense brightness, he fumbled for his communications equipment to contact his support ship. “Calling the SS Bimini. This is Fontaneda. Do you read me? Did I make it?” He tried to focus on the monitor as his vision slowly returned.
“Roger that, Fontaneda,” said the captain of the Bimini. “Direct hit. How do you fee…? Whoa. What the hell happened to you? Your face…”
Fontaneda saw the captain’s broad smile morph into a grimace. “What’s the matter, Peter?” asked Fontaneda. “Haven’t you seen a handsome young man before?” He pulled out the mirror he had stowed in his flight bag. “Oh shit,” he said, as he looked at the reflection of the horrified seventy year old man staring back at him.
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The twelve scientists stationed at the Scobee Moon-Base listened intently as the Earth-based support team updated them on the recently discovered Levy-Takanotoshi asteroid. The asteroid was a previously unknown Centaurs Class object that had its orbit perturbed by one of the gas giants. Unfortunately, it wasn’t discovered until well after periapsis. Now that it had rounded the sun, it was streaking toward the Earth at almost 20 miles per second. Astronomers calculated that it would strike the Earth in fourteen days. They were currently uncertain about how much damage the impact would cause, but they knew there was nothing they could do to divert it. The support team also reported that there was not enough time to refit and launch the Crew Exchange Vehicle before the impact. In other words, the twelve scientists would be trapped on the moon for a long, long time, depending on the extent of the damage caused by the asteroid.
Two weeks later, the twelve scientists gathered at the observation ports. The dark landscape of the moon’s night-phase was partially illuminated by the light reflected by the nearly “full Earth,” which floated motionless approximately 60 degrees above the horizon. On schedule, the asteroid came into view as it skirted past the moon and headed toward its rendezvous with Earth. It took over three hours for the asteroid to cross the gap between the moon and the Earth. The scientists took turns at the telescope watching the eight mile long, potato shaped rock slowly tumble toward the Earth. When it impacted the western coast of Africa, there was a full minute of blinding light as the asteroid vaporized itself, along with billions of tons of the Earth’s crust. Like a stone tossed into a stagnant pond, an expanding ring of compressed atmosphere raced outward from the impact site at supersonic speed. An incredible plume of dust and debris was blasted into the upper atmosphere; some of it continuing into interplanetary space. As the Earth rotated above them, the scientists watched in stunned silence as the sunset terminator slowly traversed the impact site, plummeting Africa into the relative darkness of night. From the moon, a glowing red cauldron of boiling rock, more than a hundred miles in diameter, could still be seen through the column of dust spewing from the cataclysmic scar on the Mauritanian coast. A few hours later, the impact site rotated beyond the eastern horizon. The only visible evidence of the disaster was an eerie crescent shaped red glow reflecting off of the dust particles that were spreading across the exosphere.
After a sleepless “night,” the scientists gathered again at the observation ports to watch Africa rotate over Earth’s western horizon. But there was nothing to see. The thick clouds blanketed the African continent, and much of the Atlantic Ocean. There was only a churning “cloud mountain” marking the site of the impact, as dust and debris continued billowing upward.
The scientists hadn’t received a transmission from Earth since the global atmospheric shock wave had coalesced in the South Pacific Ocean, near Australia. As the hours passed, the thickening dust clouds began to obscure the tsunami swept eastern coast of the United States. North America had a faint orange hue as fires raged across the continent. The twelve scientists solemnly accepted the unenviable fact that the possibility of rescue was non-existent. As they looked up at Earth, they each tried to memorize the familiar land formations of their decimated homeworld, because each of them knew that for the foreseeable future, there would be nothing else to look at but an impenetrable layer of gray clouds.
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.
—
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.
