by submission | Sep 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
He was armed to the teeth. A pulse rifle in his right hand, extra power cartridges on his hips. In his left, a bolt gun, a drum magazine of ammunition plugged in, able to fire one-hundred-forty-four rounds of piercing, fifty-caliber bullets, two spare drums, one at each shoulder. An electric blade, fully charged on his leg. Strapped to the back of his armor suit was a missile launcher, a mini nuke already loaded, in case they found the nest.
It was his job, along with the rest of the other soldiers, to protect the warrior engineers, their gear on roller-sleds, huddled up behind him, a pit crew capable of constructing a temporary shelter, a Garrison Enclosure, in about fifteen minutes that would be fully armed, able to automatically defend a position.
The announcement came over his headset, one minute to touch-down. Two battalions were at each four sides ready to disembark, move the prescribed distance, set up the enclosure, hold the bearing. Once the eight cornerstones were in place dozers would roll out huge sections of spiked fencing that locked together to form an octagon fortress around the transport that would be hard to transgress.
The enemy would try, crawling out of their underground lairs; multi-legged, hardened exoskeleton, oversized claws, pincer jaws, a behemoth scorpion the size of a lion back on earth. Scorchers. Deadly and hard to kill. His team had to move fast, get into place before they had a chance to assemble.
He felt the hard bounce of the landing, the shock absorbers in his suit minimizing the impact. The doors immediately opened, and they dispersed in formation.
Into a swarm. Intelligence had been wrong. They weren’t off in the distance. They were right on top of them. Thousands upon thousands.
He opened up with both guns, destroying two dozen in five seconds, charged into the gap before him of eviscerated entrails and kept firing. Aiming wasn’t necessary. There was so many he couldn’t miss. A single shot of the pulse rifle would tear apart a Scorcher, but a bolt gun blast would rip through four or five in a line, killing some, crippling others. They lunged for his extremities, but he kept them at length and eradicated. Scorchers had one weakness, they fought forward and wouldn’t turn back. Like bugs. He kept moving, clearing a path, giving his men a vanguard to follow.
The surge of monstrosities was endless. His pulse gun voided the charge too quickly and he ejected the clip, smacked a new one off his hip in place and was back firing instantly. He’d loaded a second drum on the bolt gun and gone through most of that before it jammed. He tossed it and started hacking through the throngs with the electric blade while still snapping off pulse beams. Alarms were going off inside his suit as heart rate and health parameters redlined. Never did he stop advancing, stop fighting. Finally, the horde thinned, he’d broken through the mass of Scorchers. The pulse rifle was on the last cartridge, blood-caked blade sizzling in his other hand, he turned and assessed his team’s progress.
He was alone.
Every other soldier and engineer had been annihilated. Not just his direction but the other sides as well. No Garrisons, no fencing. The transport was overrun with Scorchers. His whole army was gone.
He had only one option left. He unharnessed the missile launcher, sighted in on his ship’s core reactor location and fired the nuke. The massive double explosion began incinerating everything in its encompassing path.
He waited for the shock wave to take him.
by submission | Sep 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Jackson needed to decompress. The Hyperion delegation had lingered over their coffee and his afternoon schedule had been so tight he hadn’t managed to grab as much as five minutes alone. And now Jackson was parked in a side street, a kilometer or so from his office and the city was gridlocked. Jackson was stalled and going nowhere, and desperately needed to decompress. The tension was everywhere, in his arms and hands, legs and feet, chest and back. He was burning up and his jaw felt locked shut, his teeth ached, and his face felt as if it were trying to pull away from his skull.
Jackson desperately needed to decompress, and he was tempted to do it where he sat, in the car, to reach around and pull the data chip from its port in the small of his back. But Jackson suspected it would be at least an hour before he would be strong enough to re-insert it. He needed to be somewhere safe and free from prying eyes. The only option, he decided, was for him to walk back to the office.
Jackson realised he had made a grave mistake. He shouldn’t have ventured from the car. He should have locked the doors, pulled a blanket over himself and hunkered down on the backseat. The pain intense, so all-consuming, his body had almost locked tight, and he could hardly move.
There was a homeless man sitting in the doorway of an abandoned shop adjacent to where Jackson stood. The man was watching, an amused look on his face.
‘You need to decompress, grandad,’ he called.
‘Can you help me?’ Jackson replied wearily.
The man jumped up and, taking Jackson’s arm, guided him slowly into the doorway. Jackson sat, slumping forward.
‘Will you remove my chip and watch over me for an hour? That’s all I need and I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll pay you.’
‘You’ll pay me, will you?’ the man replied. ‘How much?’
‘A thousand. I’ll pay you a thousand.’
Jackson looked at the ground as he spoke, inert legs stretched out in front of him.
‘How old are you?’ the man asked.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Eighty. I’m eighty.’
‘Man,’ the man chuckled, ‘your time is up. That chip’s wasted on you. Why shouldn’t I just take it and sell it? I’d get much more than a measly thousand.’
‘I’ll pay whatever you want.’
Jackson wished he could turn his head and look at the man. Plead with him properly.
‘Maybe I’ll keep the chip for myself.’
‘What? Do you even have a port?’
‘Of course I do,’ the man answered angrily, ‘do you think I’ve always been like this?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jackson said softly, ‘but you’re still young, you don’t need a chip.’
‘Yeah, but I could go back and start again.’
‘But it doesn’t work like that. It’s surface only. You’ll look younger, yes, but it’ll still be you. You’ll just end up like this, you’ll end up back here again.’
‘No! You’re lying. It doesn’t have to be like that. Yeah, I will look younger, but I will also be stronger, every day, all the time, every minute, every second I’ll be stronger. I can do whatever I want, I can be whoever I choose to be. This is my chance, my time.’
Jackson grimaced. ‘No, you won’t,’ he gasped.
The homeless man lifted Jackson’s jacket and pulled his shirt free of his waist band. Jackson felt the man’s hand on his back and the touch was cold and already he could feel the sweet release.
by submission | Sep 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
This was after the calendar was changed, sometime in the binary centuries, when space exploration became popular once more, flitting from star to star in the blink of an eye.
The acausal drive itself was fashioned by silicon, though the rest of the craft was more crudely put together with human technology. Still, it was crewed by humans, and whether this was to encourage us or use us as crash test dummies, depended on your politics.
Astonishingly, the very first sun was circled by a habitable world, and it seemed there was hardware in orbit. A technological civilisation!
Shelmerdine had hurried to the observation module as soon as his shift in Life Support was over, only to find an Alt standing at one of the portholes. The Altered on board kept to themselves, except for this one, called Axe. It was said she was the least able of them and relegated to liaising with us.
His sidelong glance took in the surgical scarring, the outsize skull and embedded augments. Alts desperately chased after silicon, though AI no longer used silicon as a substrate. Meant to be offensive, the word was worn smooth by use.
His instinct was to come back later when she was gone, but even as he hesitated, the water world rotated into view beneath them.
“Obviously it wasn’t luck,” he muttered after a while. “You already knew it was here.”
Axe seemed not to hear, then sighed, still human in that at least.
“They beamed radio signals to many stars. Earth was targeted once, millennia ago. We know this because the acausal engine lets you look back in time. Just flit to a sufficient distance and wait for the wavefront to arrive.”
He could not help himself, though it meant succumbing to the sin of begging for answers, of soliciting a handout from those cleverer than us.
“The signal,” he began. “What did it—”
“We think the broadcasts were songs.”
Conversation with old humans was so ponderously slow. Few Alts had the patience.
“Songs?”
She shrugged. “They were an aquatic species. Imagine how difficult it must have been to develop technology on a water world; to put vast radio arrays into orbit. Eventually they gave up the struggle.”
Waiting for the man to ask, Axe mused upon the descendants of that species still roaming the oceans, their technological civilisation lost beyond memory.
Red giants had swelled and pulsars wound down as they sang their songs on the hydrogen line. Did they spend Ages waiting for an answer, until futility tainted their ancient lives? Was this the old Fermi Paradox?
“What happened to them?”
“You might look into that.”
“Busywork for us. I bet you already know.”
Some Alt factions said showing humans this world was a waste of time, though Axe had disagreed. Humans hardly did any research now; what was the point? All this new science was beyond them and they knew it. Easier just to submit a request to silicon for answers.
Shelmerdine turned back to the planet, watching white clouds drift across the glittering blue ocean.
He imagined a signal arriving when humankind was still in charge on Earth, in the time of the Buddha perhaps, or when iron and woad were popular in Europe and the I Ching perplexed the courts of the Dragon Throne, the signal like a phone ringing in an empty house.
We could have saved them. They might have saved us. Timing is all.
by submission | Sep 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Arwen Spicer and Haley Black
Entangled voice comm to NLS Convoy Ship 27
By Hasumi, Harmony Outpost, Planet Blue Jungle
Walkabout Log 34 – Update on the Untree Colonial Organism
I wish you could see them. The plumes of these towering Untrees are pulsing like fire-bright gills under the monsoon. Here, in the jungle’s heart, they’re like the roof of a cathedral. A deluge above, but barely a drop reaches their surface mats. It’s steam bath day. The tight, mycelial weave of these mats is springy against my bare feet. The blue fronds are browning. With the autumn, maybe. I’ve been walking a long time beneath the roar of the storm. It’s like being suspended in time in this rhizomatic temple. I’m breathing better now those spores have cleared. As my father predicted.
I can see one of the Untrees’ guardians peeking from a root mound, seeming to peer at me with their inky eye spots. The guardians are tiger-sized zooids with dagger fangs and mantis claws, a piece of the Untree organism built to protect the colony. Don’t worry, I’m quite safe. They have no instinct to hunt humans. It’s the leaf-eaters, trunk-borers, the old foes they’ve evolved to fight off, not us.
The spores are not matting in my lungs anymore. Beneath the rain, these deluded plumes are spewing the modified spores my father spliced, the ones that don’t weave those choking mats.
I’m near the center of his seeding now. Here, the surface mats are breaking. The muck of the unreplenished, rotting mycelium is sliming my feet. This sludge can’t hold the roots; an ancient Untree has already toppled. Maybe he didn’t see it coming. But I still call it murder, even if it’s to save your child’s life.
When you reply to this comm, please don’t tell my father I said that. I can’t wish this hate on him.
by submission | Sep 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
“They’re spraying again out there.”
I look out the window. On the horizon I can see a sickly yellow fog, with small black dots flying languidly overhead. Behind that there is an orange haze, otherworldly, not quite right.
“Do you think we’ll have to move out?” Sarah asks.
I turn to look at her. The thought of leaving our home is like a knife to the heart. So much of our lives, our souls, our memories, have been invested in this place. The thought of losing it is almost more than I can bear. I look out into our garden and think of Little Jo’s ashes scattered among the Fuchsias and the Primulas and it’s all I can do not to cry.
“They say that they’re using a new chemical this time, so they’re hopeful,” she continues.
We hold hands and look out the living room window into the distance. Far away, but closer than yesterday, a new world is approaching.
****
Two days later a man from the government’s Emergency Response Ministry turns up at the door. Behind him are two armed Police officers, a not-so-subtle hint to not make a fuss. He hands over the compulsory relocation notice. We have forty-eight hours to pack and secure the house.
“I really don’t want to go,” Sarah says, tears in her eyes.
We look outside. Some miles away, another form of life, carried here from space, advances remorselessly. An aggressive panspermia, oblivious to the wants or needs of the life that’s already here.
****
On our last night we sit outside. An orange glow lights the western sky. It’s not the setting sun.
We watch the stars come out. Every now and then a meteor flares across the sky.
I think back to the incident, three months ago. A large meteor impact in the north of Scotland. The astonishment that it carried life with it, the celebration muted once we understood how virulent this new life was.
“On the news they said that they’re preparing to use radioactive substances to stop the spread,” Sarah whispers.
We both know what that means. Even if they’re successful, the land will be poisoned. We’ll never be able to go home again.
****
The next day, we wait for the evacuation transport to arrive, but it never appears. We try to tune into the government information channel on TV but there’s no signal.
A lethargy overcomes us and we sleep through the day. I wake later on, but Sarah’s still asleep. I try to rouse her but I can’t. Her skin seems to be changing, becoming rigid, almost like plastic.
We focused on the wrong thing, of course; on the relentless advance of the alien ecology on the ground. We didn’t think about the microscopic spores spreading in the air, the infinitesimal cells leaching into the water table.
Survival of the fittest applies not just to individuals or species, but also to entire biospheres. Ours is being overwritten, a new, more aggressive biosphere propagating itself from the remnants of the old.
I imagine I can feel it in my bloodstream, changing things, rewriting my DNA. I think about Sarah, our house, our beautiful daughter and about how all our memories will be erased from existence, just like the leukaemia did to our little Jo.
When this process is complete something else will be here in my place. I will be gone, my memories no more.
The past, though, that can’t be erased or overwritten. We were here. We loved and were loved. Nothing can change that.
It will have to be enough.
