Love Hurts

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Street-lamps outside lit her bare flesh an iridescent blue, but he knew in the absence of light, she was chiseled obsidian, black as the sun was bright.

“It’s been a while,” her voice low and gentle, “I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”

Logan unrolled a soft-case on the night table beside the bed, absently fingering the half dozen syringes nestled within. It was going to be a long night.

“I could never stay away,” he read her face from where he sat on the edge of her bed, “I told you I’d come back, didn’t I?”

Taking her face in his hands, he felt her hair stalks bristle beneath his palms, the beating of her hearts carried up his arms as her pulse quickened.

Her hands found flesh beneath his shirt, and holding him so tight his ribs ached beneath the pressure, she pulled him over her to leave him gasping on his back beside her. She wasted no time flaying his clothing from his body, razor sharp claws extending and retracting, slicing fabric, grazing flesh but never drawing blood. When she mounted him, it was with the fury of an animal. Her breath came in frenzied gasps. His hands guiding her hips at first before sliding across her muscled body, to her breasts, then to her face. Where he touched her, her flesh turned the colour of sun touched pink as her body mimicked his own.

Flattening herself against him she pressed her mouth against his, forcing her tongue between his lips. She bit gently, serrated teeth tearing into flesh. He felt the fire of her saliva rushing into his bloodstream. His heart begin to pound, the muscle labouring as though to burst the confines of his chest. As his body stiffened, her excitement intensified, and she sat upright, heaving against him with renewed vigor.

The sensation was exquisite; his pupils fixed and dilated, his field of view remained filled with her taught, muscular flesh seemingly lit from within. Unable to blink he watched as her own lower lids closed, her eyes now translucent yellow, staring through him for what seemed like an eternity before she squeezed the upper lids shut, crying out in pleasure. Her moans washed over him in waves, the powerful paralyzers in her saliva mixed now with endorphins as her other fluids flooded his system. She had intoxicated him completely as he came, the feeling strange with his body now completely immobile and consciousness rapidly giving way to euphoric nothingness. His heart counted off his final moments in beats, unbearable in their intensity while alarming in their diminishing frequency.

In the moment he was sure he would slip away forever, the happiest of departures, he felt a lance of pain through his chest. With a sudden intake of air, his lungs filled and his heart resumed a laboured but steady beating. One by one he felt his muscles unclench, his body gradually relaxing into the sweat soaked sheets beneath him. He had barely the energy to moan as she withdrew the needle from his chest, laying the empty syringe with the others on the night table.

“That…” he could barely move enough air to make a sound.

“Shh,” she placed a finger on his lips, “you need to rest.” She curled up beside him, placing her head on his chest. “I’m glad you came back.”

Logan closed his eyes, feeling the lingering effects of her coaxing him toward sleep.

“Loving you may kill me,” he finally breathed, “but leaving you surely would.”

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Multiple Sufficiency

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

As the relative calm of midnight in the projects was broken by a series of tightly spaced explosions, Tiberius knew he’d made a serious, and perhaps fatal mistake letting their prey separate him from his brother.

Tiberius shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet as he ran, water torn from puddles streaming out behind him. Weapon in hand, he followed the sound through an alley onto the next block, his breath measured, heart rate barely rising.

In the street to his left, a crumpled mass confirmed his fear. Gaius. Tiberius hugged the wall, slowing as he closed the distance. On the ground a few feet from his fallen brother lay a cluster of discarded alloy cylinders; casings from mechanical ignition rounds. They weren’t scanning for those, an error they wouldn’t repeat.

Gaius curled face down in a pool of his own blood. The hunted had shot him in the back; the work of a coward, or the very afraid. They’d almost had him, they were this close.

Tiberius knew they’d be alone now, the prey would have taken the opportunity to distance himself from here. For both, this was a time to regroup.

Gingerly lifting his brother from the asphalt and sitting behind him, Tiberius pulled Gaius to his chest. Steadying his head between his hands, he polled his fading synaptic field, lifting the entirety of his brother’s experience since last they’d synchronized. He felt the chase, the anticipation of confrontation, sudden searing pain through his back, and finally, death. As he felt his own heart rate plummet, he pulled back, letting his brother go.

Hoisting the limp mass of the fallen man over one broad shoulder, Tiberius began the long walk home. “He ain’t heavy,” Tiberius spoke out loud to no-one, and smiled.

Once in the relative safety of their loft, Tiberius lowered his brother gently into a cavity in the floor. Opening a series of valves he watched as fluid sluiced in through the open rim. While the cylinder filled, he wandered into the kitchen, retrieved several cartons of supplemental protein and carbohydrates, and drank them while locking down the room. Fire doors crawled down the walls; heavy insulated alloy barriers turning the small apartment into a vault. The network inside isolated itself; from the outside periodic news feed queries would maintain the impression of active occupation, and a grocery order to be placed in a few weeks would ensure there would be supplies when needed.

Preparations complete, Tiberius removed his clothing, showered away the dirt and blood of the hunt, then climbed down into a second cavity in the floor adjacent to that of his brother.

Through the glass, Tiberius watched the nanotech already breaking down Gaius’ corpse, exposing raw muscle and bone to the soup of proteins and enzymes surrounding him. Placing his own hands into contoured pads, he surrendered to the process. Fluid quickly filled the tank, and he barely shuddered as it flooded his lungs. The nanotech, gelling the fluid around him, oriented his brother’s still cooling hands into the identical contours mirrored on the other side of the glass. With a blueprint to follow, the deconstruction of Gaius focused, tearing down only what needed to be repaired, or rebuilt.

Tiberius allowed himself to drift into a meditative trance. In a few weeks, his brother would be whole again, his memories restored from their unique system of backup. They would share a meal, and then they would go hunting again. Now the contract was secondary, their primary motivator was much more personal.

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Narcosis

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Truger loathed recreational narcotics; he could never understand the point. Hallucinogens, depressants, all of them ran completely counter to his personality.

This made his current situation unbearable.

He remembered the moments before the crash, the low orbit sky-fight, the enemy fighters he’d engaged and the victory that he’d been sure of, one snatched away in a hail of flak as they’d strayed too close to the anti-aircraft emplacements. His last memory was of the gaping hole in his cockpit, and the cauterized stumps of his freshly truncated arms and leg.

He remembered waking here.

The first hallucination had been the spiders. He hadn’t seen them as his eyes were bandaged, but he felt them navigate across his body, clicking and chattering, poking and prodding. He’d been trained to overcome foreign chemicals in his system, and he tried as best he could. The bandages were peeled back from his eyes, tiny metal appendages pulling away the mesh to let the light in. Somewhere far away, someone began screaming. His drug-enhanced imagination fed him back his own face reflected in a hundred shining facets. Seconds stretched into minutes before a sharp pain in his shoulder redirected his attention, and, as the light dimmed, he was aware that the screaming had stopped.

When next he awoke, the room had changed. The bugs were gone, and everything was bathed in a green white glow, it’s edges blurred and indistinct. Truger tried to sit upright, but his torso was too heavy. He concentrated instead on his drug-heavy hands, and as he struggled with them, the memory of cauterized limb fragments flashed back, vivid and real. The panicked surge of adrenaline helped him pull them into his line of sight but instead of familiar or even burnt flesh he found clear, crystalline limbs of stunning beauty. He marveled as the light refracted through their internal structures, until their weight finally overcame his strength.

He had to wake up. This hallucinogenic daydream was too much.

Somewhere, someone was screaming again.

Truger couldn’t remember falling asleep, or being awoken again. The light had changed, and a flurry of activity in his peripheral vision begged for his attention. His head was too leaden to move, so he strained his eyes to the left and wished he hadn’t. A doctor, resplendent in his gown, moved in and out of his field of view conversing with a nurse. Their heads both stretched impossibly in the dim light, elongated and flailing whip-like at the air. The doctor’s arms tapered off into slender, excessively jointed digits which undulated as he spoke. Their words were no more than melodic chirps to Truger’s intoxicated mind. That people took these chemicals into their system willingly and for entertainment was beyond his comprehension. The images they superimposed on his reality terrified him, and he squeezed his eyes shut as though willing the distorted shapes to disappear.

He felt something in his personal space, and opened his eyes to the faces of the medical staff, pressed close and staring, eyes now faceted and double lidded, mouths a quivering mass of vertical fleshy strips.

“Stop giving me drugs,” he screamed into their startled faces, the force of his words driving them back. “I can suffer the pain, but these drugs, you’re driving me out of my mind.” The effort taxed him to near unconsciousness. As his awareness slipped away into blackness, he whispered simply “no drugs”, a series of sound-waves the doctors chirped and clicked about for some time, trying to decipher what these noises could possibly mean.

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Romeo Uniform November

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Claire cleared the fire-doors just moments before they sealed the lab. She knew they would hold for a while, but still ran down the corridor dragging the unconscious Doctor behind her. He out-massed her by a wide margin, but she severely outmuscled him.

The outer doors irised out of their way, and she dragged the Doctor to a clear space on the floor. There was no time for niceties. Without hesitation she drove a large catheter into the Femoral artery in his thigh, leaving the unsecured end to spasm as blood pumped through it onto the floor.

She tore through the supply cabinets and returned with a cryogel pack and injector, which she hurriedly assembled and drove through his chest and into his heart. The gel pack flooded his vital organs with its oxygen rich preservative while Claire counted the agonizing minutes, his life pooling on the floor, sticky about her feet.

When she was sure the bleeding had stopped, she set to with a scalpel, quickly removing every appendage that was too big to fit into a cryocan. When she was finished, the Doctor had been reduced to a head and torso, limbs cut clean revealing the pink sponge-like gel that had replaced all his bodily fluid.

Outside she could hear heavy equipment at the fire-doors. They’d be through in a matter of minutes and could not be allowed to capture her. What she knew they would extract bit by bit, cell by data saturated cell until not even the one with her name on it remained intact.

She hoisted the Doctor from the floor, abandoning the off-cut pieces and carried him to the reactor anti-chamber. She retrieved a cryocan from the lab and hurriedly stuffed him inside. Slipping the wiring harness into place and pushing the steel pickups in through unfeeling flesh she paused, bent, and kissed his cooling lips.

She sealed the canister and hoisted it over the railing, leapt gazelle-like after it and bending nearly double, at a run pushed the canister across the safety apron and launched it into the pool of coolant. She watched for a moment to be sure it sank before sprinting back across the steel floor, hurdling the railing and hurtling back through the lab, opening valves and spilling large containers of chemicals. Corrosives splashed at her skin, but she ignored her burning flesh, focused instead on priming an explosive cocktail in the tightly enclosed room.

Satisfied that there would be no evidence left behind, she dropped into a chair and jacked a fibre cable through the pickup in her ear.

“Claire. Emergency upload protocol. Tango Romeo Uniform Sierra Tango.”

A voice in her head responded, “Charlie Lima Alpha bio acknowledged. Outbound transmissions offline.”

“Override. Nuclear environmental reporting channel. Possible burn-through.”

“Override engaged. Nuclear EV channel online. Destination EPA.”

“Override. Destination random. Public internet cafe. Sweden.”

“Override engaged. Upload commencing.”

Claire felt her life siphoning from her physical self and flood out onto the network, and as she became less aware of the burning of her flesh, she became instantly aware of the Special Ops forces breaching the outer fire door, of the agents surrounding the complex, and of the intense fireball that erupted from the lab, vapourizing the recent incarnation of Claire in flesh and the scraps of the Doctor she’d scattered on the floor.

As she poured from the back channel out on the nets into Sweden, she hoped she could highjack a body at least as capable as the one she’d abandoned. She was going to need something special to get her Doctor back.

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Of or Relating to Sound

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Marshal’s great grandfather had taken up the guitar as a older man, and played it as though he simply always had done so. He had passed this love onto his son, Marshal’s grandfather, before the Departure. Marshal’s family had always been tradesman, and his grandfather used his degrees in micro-fabrication to get on the ship, and his skill at coaxing sounds from his stringed instrument to secure not only a wife, but a place in the social scene on Discovery when she set off into the stars.

Marshal’s grandfather had one child on the voyage, a daughter, and she grew up always at her father’s side, basking in the warmth of his music. She took up chemistry, and divided her time between misusing chemicals in defiance of the ships authority, and caressing deep rhythm and blues from the guitar her father had left her.

When Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.

Marshal grew in the care of the crew to be a stoic but directionless young man. He dabbled in chemistry, in microbiology, and settled on psiono-sonics as a field of study. He found he had a heightened sensitivity in communications, and was tasked with reaching out across the void of space to the other star ships en route to new star systems.

In time, the voices grew harder and harder to find through the darkness, and communications duty became an eternity of projecting into nothingness, deafened by the silence returned.

When the star drive began to fail, Marshal felt it before anyone. He tried to describe to the Captain how the engine was losing its rhythm, how he worried it would stop beating.

He’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.

When the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.

Marshal had spent very little time in his own cabin, having not grown up there, and finding it unsettling to be in the room this mother he had never known had once called home. He could never connect himself to the space, but now, confined there as he was, he found himself idly picking through her things, discovering the woman who had made him and then left him here alone.

He flipped through frames of images, some single and still, some sequenced and moving. He heard laughter, saw a smile he recognized sometimes from the mirror, and felt a rhythm that resonated somewhere inside.

When he found her guitar, it fit his hands like well worn gloves, filled a hole he hadn’t realized existed. His fingers found the chords to a song he’d never heard. A to C sharp, to G sustained, back to A. Words drifted into his head with impossible clarity, “If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.” Across the ship each psionicly projected note from Marshal’s guitar turned every surface capable of vibrating into a point of amplification. Everyone stopped, and listened. “We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,” people spilled into the hallways, “from the bottom of the sea.”

Marshal felt long closed doors open in his mind as he reached out into the depths of space. He felt the wave come back a hundred strong, and the Discovery reeled as unseen voices chimed in “But First, are you experienced?” In his cabin, the Captain closed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. They may be lost, but they were no longer alone.

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