by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 13, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The Argon cruised through dense fog heading out to sea in weather most trawlers wouldn’t brave. She lined up between the marker buoys and throttled up, downwash from her propulsors kicking up spray from the water thirty meters below her hull.
“Full ahead, light the finder, kill the beacons.” Captain Creavy barked orders to the ready crew, “See that the nav gear is decoupled before we change course.”
The Argon took to sea weekly, bringing in a belly full of fresh fish none of the other locals could match. She was the largest of the fishing vessels by an order of magnitude and never came home empty.
“Captain,” the first mate finished wiping the ship off the Coastal Guardian network, “we’re clear for a new course.”
The Captain studied the maps he had before him, charts he’d bartered for along with this vessel. These maps were from a satellite’s vantage, the likes of which not even the Coastal Guardians could have seen. Creavy loved the advantage barter and off-worlders brought to his livelihood.
“Take us thirty minutes two seventy degrees then prepare to dive.” Creavy leaned on the console, staring with apparent lust at the thick concentrations of fish on the maps before him. They’d been systematically fishing these patches for most of the season while the smaller vessels pulled up empty on all their usual routes.
The vessel grumbled through the sky, lost in the low cloud until they reached their mark and the finders started sounding off the stragglers of the target school.
“Dive Mr. Finch, dive.” At the Captain’s orders the lumbering craft slowed and gave up altitude gradually until the waves beneath began to batter her hull, then she dropped heavily into the water and nosed down to plow beneath the waves. Once completely submerged the pilot adjusted depth until the massive craft was on level with the school advancing before them, then the nose of the Argon was peeled open and she drank deeply, accelerating through the water pulling everything in her path into her belly and filtering mercilessly to jettison nothing but water out the aft hatches. Within minutes the entire school was contained, the nose closed, ballast jettisoned and the Argon was airborne again.
“Mr. Finch, find us a masked trajectory to the upper atmosphere, we’ve a rendezvous to make.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Another thirty minutes passed before the freighter reached the point where the sky kissed space and where waited their buyer, the ship a dark stain against the otherwise star filled sky. Guardian law prohibited off-worlders from fishing the local oceans, but Creavy had had the good fortune of buying the Argon on advance credit with these traders along with his fishing charts in exchange for half his catch delivered to unregulated space. This was a deal far too good not to exploit.
While they docked and their cargo was transferred, Creavy waited, and as the last of the fish was offloaded the communicator crackled to life.
“Captain Creavy, we thank you for once again fulfilling your obligations, and hereby release you from our contract. The Argon is now yours, as are any future proceeds you may recover from your efforts.”
Creavy was first confused, then relieved. He’d gotten the long end of the stick on this for sure and wasn’t about to argue.
“I’d be happy to trade cargo in future for updated nautical charts…” He put the offer out tentatively.
The reply was terse. “That won’t be possible.”
With that the comm-link was broken and the dark craft began accelerating away from the planet.
“Mr. Finch, take us back down, follow a clean path out of sight back to the Loreanaz Trench and let’s load up and go home.
The Argon stayed at sea for three more weeks, trudging from one patch to the next following the old charts, but there were simply no fish to be found. Dangerously low on fuel the Argon lit it’s navigation beacons and reestablished itself on the Guardian’s grid.
Captain Creavy was starting to think perhaps he’d gotten the short end after all.
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 5, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tom fished through the basket of coffee pucks until he found one marked simply ‘Columbian’.
“Got a thing against coffee flavoured coffee do you Sam?” He couldn’t see his friend through the glare of the flood lamps, but he could hear him shuffling around in the shadows. “Sure I can’t make you one?” He lifted the lid on the battered stainless coffee machine, inserted the puck and picked through the assortment of mugs while the heater primed.
“No. I can’t…” Sam’s voice was different, deeper. “don’t want to mess with stimulants just yet.”
Tom laughed, slamming the lid and punching the button to begin brewing.
“When have you ever been one to not take anything?”
With a sharp click one end of the loft space became bathed in the cold glow of hanging sodium lights. Sam stood beneath the harsh glare and dropped the switch box to let it swing by its wire from the ceiling.
Tom forgot all about his coffee.
“Since I got here, Tom, this is what I wanted to show you.”
Tom’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he moved away from the makeshift kitchenette in the middle of the room to the open space where his friend now stood.
“Christ Sam, what the hell did you do?”
Sam stood, clad only in surfer shorts, his skin glistening chameleochrome over rippling chorded muscle. He’d become a caricature of the man Tom had known before. His hair was gone, his feet larger and more solid than Tom remembered from all the summers they’d barefooted at his uncle’s cottage. His hands, too, seemed larger, the fingers elongated and sinewy.
“I’ve changed, Tom. I’ve taken everything I’ve studied, everything I’ve worked with in genetics, biomech, nano-tech and kinetic design and applied it to building a better me.” He smiled at this, revealing powerful looking teeth punctuated by gleaming fangs, wickedly curved and cat-like.
“Watch.”
Sam crouched, flattening himself almost to the floor, his legs coiled beneath him like springs and then erupted towards the ceiling, crossing the distance in a blink to hang, one handed from the steel structure twenty meters above his head. Noiselessly he swung his feet up and braced himself between two rows of girders, then spider crawled at alarming speed across the ceiling to the darkness at the far end of the room. Tom watched awestruck as Sam dropped to the floor and literally bounded across the space, covering ten meters in each step, clearing the entire kitchen counter and snatching up the forgotten mug of coffee, sealing the lid with one massive hand to cartwheel over Tom’s head and land mere inches in front of him.
“Your coffee Tom?” Sam grinned, barely breathing and not having broken a sweat, or spilled a drop.
“Holy shit Sam,” Tom took the mug and gaped. “Holy shit.”
“It’s been quite a ride, I made some mistakes earlier on, but nothing uncorrectable. I think I’ve got this pretty much figured out, now I just need to decide what to do next.”
“Next? Sam, you’re like…” he paused, his eyes wide and hand waving, “like freaking Superman.”
“Yes, I suppose I am in a way,” Sam crossed his arms, then stroked his chin, “but Superman was a good guy, wasn’t he?”
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Doctor Spake slipped the needle into the fatty flesh of the rat and depressed the plunger, then withdrew and watched.
“This rat is almost three years old,” the Doctor addressed the Senator standing opposite him, “virtually at the end of its lifespan as you can see by its appearance.
The Senator regarded the withered rat with distaste. The benefits of this science appealed to him, but the specifics and the dirty work was for others; he had no interest and little patience.
In the cage, the rat began to become noticeably more agitated, its sparse and flat fur visibly thickening, taking on a healthy looking sheen.
This the Senator took interest in.
“What’s happening to the rat? It looks like it’s getting…”
“Younger.” Spake cut him off. “The injected nano-tech has reverted the rat to roughly a third of its expired life.”
Senator Thrush looked back and forth between Spake and the rat, which was now feeding aggressively.
“You’re sure about this? Sure that this will work? I know what you said, but this…” Thrush regarded the Doctor as though seeing him for the first time. “Why haven’t you used this on yourself? You still look to be…” he paused, “sixty?”
“Eighty two, actually. Thank you. I installed an earlier version of the nano myself before I’d perfected the regression capabilities, and I’m afraid my installed version is incompatible with this one. It does have its benefits, for example I’m better at developing connections, if you know what I mean.” Spake smiled, a practiced, reassuring smile.
It took forty five more minutes to convince the Senator, and by morning Thrush left feeling and looking like a man half his age.
Months later Senator Thrush had achieved all but the most lofty of his personal goals, taking his party’s nomination from the incumbent in a landslide, his sights set firmly on The White House.
As he sat in his office late one evening, a warm summer breeze stirring the leaves of the tree outside, a fifteen year old bottle of Macallan disappearing one glass at a time, he found himself thinking of the Doctor. There had been messages that he’d been too busy to return, and he wondered if he should contract someone to keep an eye on the good Doctor, lest he forget his place.
Thrush suddenly felt ill, the room swimming around him. He pushed his glass away on the desk, trying without success to steady himself against the dark heavy expanse of mahogany.
“Senator Thrush. You’ve been negligent in fulfilling your end of our agreement.”
Thrush vomited on his desk, the voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, his head pounding.
“I told you my nano advantage was dependent on connections? Do you remember that Senator?”
Blood dripped from Thrush’s sinus, spattering on the desk.
“Specifically those connections are what you may know as quantum entanglements. They tie two distinct and different things together, like atoms, at a quantum level.”
Thrush felt his legs go numb, heavy and no longer under his control. Pins and needles itching his fingertips, crawling up his arms to his shoulders.
“While the good Doctor will have died of an apparent heart failure this evening in his lab, it wouldn’t be fair for a politician to never grow old, to benefit from the Doctor’s life work without having ever contributed anything himself. Would it?”
Thrush blinked, for a moment he could swear there were steel benches surrounding him, cool white tile against his cheek. Then blackness overtook him.
Spake flexed his limbs, massaging the numbness from his forearms and fingers.
Then he sat, removed a tissue from a box on the desktop and wiped absently at the blood on his upper lip.
“Senator ‘Spake’ Thrush, PhD.” The Doctor formed the words with his new mouth. As he poured himself another glass of Scotch he added “I rather like the sound of that.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 7, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Voychek stood at the edge of the crater, heavy boots slowly sinking into the dusty surface as he surveyed the damaged instrumentation balloon below. He could feel the wind whip frozen particles the size of grain pellets in torrents around him, the staccato beating against his suit muffled by the hardened exterior.
His suit was virtually impenetrable. The balloon, however, hadn’t done nearly as well.
Grunting, he half walked, half skied down the gradual slope of the crater wall, stopping when he reached the equipment pod. The meter plus wide spherical canister appeared to have clipped a sheer face as it fell, the top having been sliced off neatly, coming to rest a dozen metres away from the rest of the container and its battered contents.
Further still lay the harness that had attached the balloon to the equipment pack, now limp in the dust, the risers and lines splayed out, the burners torn off and the silver expanse of fabric fluttering limply in the solar wind, its skirt and lower panels shredded like so much swiss cheese.
Voychek walked to the canister lid and kicked down hard on one edge, the piece bouncing up into his waiting hand as though it were a skateboard and he a free-wheeling teenager.
He chuckled, dropping the shell back into the dust and again kicking hard at its edge, flipping it up into his hand.
From the command tower, his compatriots watched in puzzlement through long glasses.
“What the hell is he doing out there?” The balding Dominic scratched his head absently.
“Who knows, who cares. Not my problem until he brings that gear back in for me to fix.” Chase turned his back on the large observation panel and walked away.
Outside, Voychek threw the sliced off section of shell face down in the dust where the harness lay, then stood on it, wedging his boots between the cross-bracing and turning the toes out to grip the panel. Bending, he picked up the harness leads and flicked them, as one might coax a horse to action by snapping its reins.
The lead lines rippled outwards, lifting the tattered fabric out of the dust only momentarily.
Voychek snapped the lines again, then pulled back hard, the tension pulling a larger section of fabric into the inhospitable atmosphere where the whipping wind snatched at it. The increased pressure filled the section, pulling it further off the ground and taking up the slack in the risers and lines with considerable force.
Voychek tensed, heels pushed hard into the plate beneath him, holding steady in the shifting surface dust. Knees bent, arms straining he coaxed the battered balloon fabric higher off the ground until it cleared the crater lip and caught the full force of the wind whipping above it.
Voychek shot forward like a rocket, instinctively turning himself and angling the board so he was being pulled along sideways. Digging in at the last possible instant, he used his forward momentum to climb the side of the crater wall diagonally, and worried for several long seconds as he shot vertically out of the crater, high above the surface, still travelling forward at great speed before gravity brought him back down hard. He tucked into a crouch to take up the impact, then bounced back up to skim across the landscape throwing great plumes of dust out behind him.
From the observation deck, Dominic lowered his long glass and smiled.
“Don’t expect Voychek back anytime soon. Looks like before he salvages any of the equipment, he’s going to salvage what’s left of his afternoon.”
As Voychek raced towards the horizon Dominic added “He might be calling for a ride.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The soldier sat on the corner of his footlocker in the virtually empty barracks, the barrel of his sidearm pressed against his temple.
A respectful distance away, Major Ramses watched the younger man calmly, speaking in soothing tones with a Southern accent.
“Son, you don’t have to do this. There are people here that can help you, whatever it is you’re feeling…”
The soldier cut him off. “That’s the problem, sir. I don’t feel. There are soldiers in my unit that bleed, that scream, that cry sometimes when people die, but I don’t do any of that. And then there’s this.” He trailed off and raised his left arm into the light. Where the skin had been burned away, metal braided fabric showed through underneath. “I don’t know what the hell I am, but I’m sure as hell not one of you.”
Ramses raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Don’t be so sure,” he chuckled. “Look, son, we’ve been patching you boys up with all kinds of new medical tech. You got shot up pretty bad, and you were out for a while. The docs did the best they could do for you, and look at you. You’ve got a fully functioning arm, no missing pieces. The skin will grow back, or we’ll graft it fresh if it doesn’t. New parts don’t make you any less of a soldier, any less of a man.”
“What’s my name? My tags say Walton, Emmett J., but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember where I came from. If I dug through the skin on my chest, would I find metal there too? I expect I would. I’m not a messed up man, I’m messed up, but I’m no man. Why can’t I even pull the trigger on this thing?”
Emmett pushed the gun hard into the flesh of his scalp, straining with visible effort to pull the trigger, but his trigger finger wouldn’t budge. Gradually he slid the barrel up until it cleared his short cut hair and without hesitation his finger responded, firing off a round into the bunk beside him, the flash burning a path across the top of his skull. He quickly pushed the gun back to the side of his head and tried again to no avail.
“If I was human, I could end this. I don’t know what the hell I am, sir, but if I was human, I could end this right now.”
Again, his slid the barrel up the curve of his scalp until the barrel cleared the top of his skull and squeezed off a second round.
Neither man flinched as he jammed the still hot barrel into his cheek, the flesh singeing beneath the metal.
Major Ramses considered the soldier for a moment, and then spoke almost in a whisper.
“Sicherheit deaktivieren. Sicherheitsautorisierung echo november delta.”
Walton’s German was rusty, and as he traced a line up the side of his face with the barrel of his gun, he worked out ‘Safety’ and ‘Authorization’, and the acronym was easy…
The weapon fired again, the bullet tearing into the soft tissue and stopping cold against his armoured brainpan, the recoil and impact tearing the weapon from his hand.
“I’m sorry son, but even if I let you do it, won’t do you no damn good.” He shook his head in resignation. “We’ll get someone down here to patch up your software. Can’t have you breaking down in a platoon with meat-bags in it, you’ll upset morale something fierce.”
Walton sat startled, hand stinging and head ringing.
“At Ease soldier.” Ramses walked towards the barracks door, pausing only to add “Status-Herunterfahren”.
Behind him, Walton, Emmett J. slumped forward motionless, the haunted look in his eyes frozen in place.
