by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 13, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The orbiter had touched down at Vandenberg, and Lewis and a dozen others had flown cargo the thirty minutes to San Francisco airport. They trudged in from the tarmac in loose formation out of habit, unprepared for the crowds in the terminal.
The debriefing team had talked about friction, that the religious right had taken offense to their involvement in the colony war.
There was an awkward moment when the soldiers met the seething mass of people, unsure if there would be familiar faces, confused by the angry looks and rumbled undercurrent of discontent.
“Murderers,” a lone voice lit the fuse, causing the crowd to erupt into a cacophonic barrage of unfettered hatred.
The soldiers had faced more threatening forces, but here, at home, unarmed and unprepared, they could do nothing but close ranks and retreat to safety.
Police raised riot shields as picketers raised placards, the two groups squaring off as the tired soldiers slipped away through the terminal.
Lewis took the shuttle to the BART platform. In an hour he’d be in Lafayette, at home with his wife and his little girl. He understood now why Tessa hadn’t been there to meet him.
The waiting rail car was almost full. Finding a vacant seat, he addressed the woman seated across from it.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
The woman’s eyes flared up at his, and drawing up noisily she spat on his boots.
“Murderer.” Her eyes burned into him as he turned and walked to the other end of the car. “Did you forget God while you were fighting up there?” Ignoring her, he found and lowered himself into another vacant seat. His massive frame, used to two years of a gee and a half nearly crushed the structure as he landed. The people already sitting nearby quietly got up and moved away, taking up standing positions with their backs to him.
They were in Oakland City when four young men produced guns as the doors closed and the train began to move again.
“All of you, wallets, jewelry and phones in the bags,” the shorter of the men spoke loudly as they moved through the car, waving guns with one hand, bags open in the other.
“Are you going to fucking do something?” The same woman had Lewis fixed with a glare again, though this time her eyes were filled with fear.
The men hadn’t noticed Lewis, and as he raised himself from his seat, they backed away, raising then lowering their guns uncertainly. Lewis bristled with armor, the chitin alloy plating spliced into his skin would stop anything of the calibre these men could heft, and in sheer mass he could crush them without effort. They knew that as well as he did.
“Listen man, we got no problem with you, we’re just making a living…”, the stocky one’s voice trailed off as Lewis brushed past him.
Lewis stopped facing the woman, her eyes darting from him to the wavering guns behind him. He bent over, wiping up some of the still wet spittle from the toe of his boot. She jerked back and froze as he raised his hand. Putting a wet finger to her face, he smeared a cross on her forehead.
“I hope your God remembers you, when you meet him.” His face was inches from hers, his breath hot on her trembling face.
The entire car stared in shocked silence as he straightened and stepped off the train at MacArthur station, leaving them alone, passengers and thieves.
There’d be another train shortly, and at the moment Lewis needed, more than anything else, space.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 6, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tucker went through the drills with the rest of the squad in a state of meditative indifference. It took focused effort to keep his mech and chem systems in check while still performing well enough to earn one of the dozen seats on the Mars shuttle. These freelance lifts were rare, and he couldn’t miss this opportunity.
What little attention he could spare he directed to monitoring the other’s level of performance. He deliberately maintained a slightly-better-than-middle spot in the ten kilometer run and obstacle course. He kept that position as they commando-crawled five hundred meters through a muddy creek bed while a machine-gunner fired a steady stream of live rounds over their heads, the gun’s belt drive screaming above the clatter of shell casings piling up at her feet.
Several of the men curled up fetal under fire, disqualifying themselves involuntarily, and Tucker downgraded his speed accordingly.
It wouldn’t take a genius to recognize his Special Ops rigging if he slipped here, and that would bring a rapid and painful end to Tucker’s unauthorized excursion.
Pulling himself out of the muck, Tucker loped the last hundred meters downhill to the gun range, joining the dozen or so already there. Several sported bloody stripes across their backs where they’d been grazed by the gunfire.
Tucker wiped the mud from his hands on the back of his pants, before unracking and loading an M4 Carbine and stepping into an empty slot on the range. There were only two perfect shoots ahead of him that he could see, and he squeezed off an evenly spaced volley of shells at his target, carefully distributing them across the red of the bulls-eye, and deliberately putting one just outside the bull, kissing the colour.
Making safe the weapon, he re-racked it and followed the others along a short trail and into another clearing. Here a handful of uniformed men stood reading incoming performance data on hand held pads while they waited for the stragglers to filter in.
“Sten, Rourke, Burke and Trillo, you’re in Red Quad. Clean up, suit up and be on the apron at sixteen hundred.” The shortest of the uniformed men barked the orders.
“Abrahms, Booker, Suez and Styne, Blue Quad. Clean and suited, on the apron. Sixteen hundred.”
“Jope, Minerez, Minsk and Parker, Green Quad. Clean, suited, sixteen hundred.
For a moment Tucker felt panic well up, and nearly lost his grip. Parker had finished behind him in all the exercises, but must have impressed on the range. As Parker elbowed his way through the crowd, Tucker sidled up and, unnoticed, drove two rigid fingers into the base of his spine as he passed. The movement was so swift and the contact so brief that the man barely noticed. It wasn’t until he’d taken another dozen steps through the crowd that his legs folded up neatly beneath him, and he dropped silently to the dirt.
There was quick discussion amongst the uniforms as a medic made his way through the confused crowd to the fallen man.
“Tucker, take Parkers place in Green, looks like this is your lucky day.”
Tucker knew that it was Parker who’d gotten the lucky break. He still had to kill the rest of them once they cleared orbit and that was unlikely to be as painless.
The thought of imminent violence brought the chem bubbling to the surface, and he pushed it back down. Not here, not now. He’d stay near comatose through liftoff, but before the zero hour there’d be no reason left to hide, and they’d have nowhere to run.
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Caroline walked the long way down from the bluffs, down the winding dirt road and out into the farm fields. To her right the abandoned silo – silent silhouette against the moonlit sky. Impotent concrete rocket reaching skyward, never to fly.
Derek was a jerk. He had driven her up there, her and the friends they shared. She just assumed.
Never assume.
Once Donna arrived it was pretty clear his attention was elsewhere.
“Don’t go!” He’d called out, but she left anyways. He didn’t follow.
Jerk.
In the distance a dog barked at her intrusion, but the sound didn’t grow closer, and the farm house was too far from the road for her to worry. She watched, looking for lights in the windows, for some sign she wasn’t alone. So distracted, she didn’t notice the odd streak of light hanging in the middle of the road ahead of her until she’d almost stepped into it.
Static crackle caused her to snap her head around to find a sliver of bright white light suspended in the air, almost as tall as her.
Unconsciously, she took a step back, and the band of light seemed to do the same, segmenting into two vertical halves, one moving back first, followed by the other.
Caroline fumbled in her pocket for her phone, and holding it in front of her thumbed the tiny camera to life. The device chimed three times, and then clicked, flashing the screen in a futile attempt at lighting the scene. She frowned at the phone, the image a complete white out.
Spreading itself into a virtual wall of light almost the full width of the road, the anomaly pulsed dimly three times, then flashed bright as daylight. She stood blinking, then dropped her phone and gaped at the image of herself captured on the shimmering fabric of translucence. Her likeness flickered, suspended, looking altogether as surprised as she felt.
From the ground, her phone began to vibrate, the 1812 Overture rising in volume from its tiny speaker. Still fixated on her captured image, she picked up the phone. Derek. A flood of emotion caught up with her. Jealousy, hope and for the first time fear of this strange phenomenon she was experiencing alone on this road.
The light shimmered and changed, her likeness distorting and shredding as the smooth fabric of brightness fragmented into a multitude of ribbons. It began to vibrate in time with her phone, and from seemingly everywhere at once, the 1812 Overture shook the ground beneath her feet.
The phone hit the ground again, this time only seconds before Caroline. She clasped her hands over ringing ears as the thin pillars of light began dancing around her, some searing white, some deep blue, some variegating through all colours of the spectrum. She curled up fetal on the ground as they closed in, surrounding her, cutting off any possible retreat to the farm house.
“Get away from me,” she screamed, clamping her hands down tightly over her ears, but unable to look away. “Leave me alone, get away, leave me alone!”
For a moment, the light faltered, pulling away and dimming in its intensity. Unsure.
“Please, leave me alone,” she sobbed.
The hanging strands of light slipped into each other, merging as they touched, until there was but one dim stripe of light hanging over the roadway. It hovered for just a moment, and then zipped from the dirt, to the silo on the horizon and then straight up into the night sky.
Caroline watched, tears streaming down her face as she called out. “Wait, don’t go.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“Mama?” A tiny voice slipped quietly through the room. Between her and the woman in the bed an impenetrable forest of metal stands, tubes and blinking machinery stood guard.
“Come in sweetheart, it’s alright.” Her mother’s voice warmed the space, shushing the noisy equipment. “Mama’s alright baby, come see me.”
Clad in a pink dress and knee socks, the girl of no more than five years bravely stepped away from the safety of the door frame. Big blue eyes focused and fixed on her mother lying in the hospital bed, and her legs carried her along that line of focus until she could reach out and touch her hand.
“There, there, Mama’s all better now.” She held her daughter’s hand gently, but firmly. “The doctors made me all better. Come. Climb up here and cuddle with me.” She tried her best not to wince, shuffling a little to one side to make room. She held her one arm away so her daughter wouldn’t become tangled in the web of cords snaking away from her body.
The girl climbed cautiously up the side of the bed, nearer the foot so as to avoid the side rail, and then crawled up beside her mother and lay her head gingerly on her chest.
“Did they really take out your broken heart Mama?” She barely breathed the words.
“Yes dear, they really did.”
The girl put her ear tentatively to her mother’s chest, listening for the familiar thrub thrubbing, but there was no such noise.
“Mama?” She started and stopped.
“Yes dear?”
“Mama, can you still love me now that they took your heart away?” The words were brave, but her voice quivered.
Her mother wrapped her arms around her baby girl. “Of course I still love you. My love for you isn’t caught up in some broken old heart, it comes from everywhere.” She suppressed a gasp as the little girl squeezed her back tightly.
The girl contented herself snuggling quietly a time.
“Mama,” she said finally, “your love doesn’t rumble like thunder like it used to.” She pressed one ear again to her mothers breast, covering the other ear with a free hand. The sound rising up wasn’t the familiar steady beating she had grown with, but rather a different sound that ebbed and flowed. She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to breath being drawn in, and pushed out, and to the rhythmic rushing that kept time.
“Mama, your love whooshes like the ocean. Like the great big wide ocean.” She lay there, eyes closed and smiling, liking very much the new sounds her mother made.
Her mother lay still too, her tears also like the ocean, but adding no sound of their own.
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Kruger had given up wiping the dust off his goggles, relying instead on the shadow cast by the ridge line for direction, a shadow that was shrinking. They’d have to find a pass to the other side before the sun swung overhead, or risk boiling in their watersuits.
A gap in the rock opened up, and turning into it, Kruger saw in his periphery what looked like a large rock retreat into the shadows. He stopped, and Packard stepped into him hard from behind, almost knocking him down.
“Warn me before you do that.” Packard’s was too tired for his voice to convey annoyance.
Kruger pawed away the dust on his goggles, staring into the darkness. Had he hallucinated that?
“I think that rock’s alive,” he pointed one gloved finger, raising his arm only from the elbow, “the locals eat some kind of shell meat from out here, that might be food.”
His copilot moved closer, wiping at the red film that obscured his vision, skepticism hidden beneath his sealed headpiece.
“I wish I’d thought to grab the rock hunting gear before we bailed.” Kruger noted his companion wasn’t too tired for sarcasm.
Kruger kicked loose a chunk of stone and tossed it into the darkness, flinching despite himself as a flat expanse of what appeared to be rock dislodged itself and lumbered along on four angular legs in the shadows before hunkering down and becoming still again.
“I think we’d best leave that alone Kruge, I doubt we could beat that craggy bastard to death on a good day.”
Kruger felt a bead of sweat form on his nose before his recycler snatched it up, and he realized the sun had moved overhead, the temperature inside his suit rising.
“We’ll get ahead of it, chase it out into the open.” Kruger moved slowly, careful to step back inside the decaying shadow.
“Ahead of it?”, Packard’s voice taking on an incredulous tone, “Chase the damned thing? We’ve been walking for four bloody days, I’m not in any shape to catch anything, and if we did, how do you propose we kill it?”
“We sweat to stay cool, and we’ve got suits to conserve moisture. That thing’s hiding in the shadows and trying hard not to move. If we make it run in the open desert, I doubt it will last five minutes.”
“I doubt if I’ll last five minutes.”
“Pack, it could be days before we get back, we need food. We just run it until it drops, and it’ll bake in the sun all afternoon. We wait in the shade until dark, then we eat.” Kruger had a plan. Kruger always had a plan.
Packard shook his head, but followed the pilot’s lead, moving carefully past the creature while collecting fist sized chunks of rock.
When they were safely on the shadowed side of the ridge, they began mercilessly pelting the animal with thrown stone, forcing it first to retreat to the edge of the outcropping, and then reluctantly to break cover and lumber off into the blinding afternoon sun. They chased it as far as they could, before returning to the safety of the overhang, watching it stagger and falter on the open ground, unable to find refuge from the heat.
Kruger sat carefully, leaning back against the rock. “Now we wait.”
Packard pictured the hard shelled creature, likely drifting over with sand while they sat there.
“I only wish I’d thought to grab a can opener when I was bailing out.”
Packard again; always with the sarcasm.