by submission | Jul 1, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
The starship Seeker One’s domed Hall of Wisdom sweltered below its scintillating chandeliers. High Commander Razzra’s lavender skin glistened against his white majestic draping required for Priestess Masotulama’s Task of Finding for the Achaeans. She would be graced with honor or chastened, as required, clearing their group transgression for failure. It was her twelfth attempt at planet recognition during their endless pilgrimage to the home world Ah’Ya.
“Are you prepared, Masotulama, for tasting? Is your source pure?” To Razzra’s right shone a holograph of a twirling blue sphere representing Ah’Ya. At his left, a glowing yellow star projection surged with solar flares as foretold in origin mythos. He presented images to the High Priestess for her approval to attempt the ritual. She nodded, gathering her white robes as she bent her legs to sit before Razzra, his violet eyes and shock of orange hair lowering to follow her descent.
Masotulama’s jade-green flesh shuddered as blue plasma orbs from her pineal gland awakened, rising above her forehead, surrounded by flowing tresses of fiery red and gold. “I praise the moment, for our seeking of Founders, Commander. Let dust of life be given.” She passed the test of purity earlier while blindfolded; faultlessly identifying three fruits from the ship’s gardens using only her sense of taste, a gift only blessed ones possessed among Achaeans. Beside her rested the Holy of Holies—few remaining residues from Ah’Ya, sent with colonizers millions of years past, before the journey of returning.
Twenty of the starship’s robed tribal leaders circled her, calmly droning prayers of recognition, “Ah’Ya…Ah’Ya…Ah’Ya.”
Masotulama rocked gently in trance below the Commander as a floating sampling probe arrived fresh from the blue planet spinning below their ship’s orbit. The device halted, suspended near her head. She moved her left hand upward, summoning probe soil chambers to grind their contents, releasing shimmering brown mists to gather around her head. She opened her mouth wide, drawing deep breaths as dust surrounded her face, clouding her sparkling third eye.
She sat still as if turned to stone until snakelike undulations began emerging from her head and slowly swept down her nearly supine torso. Her arms flew upward as she coughed out the dark planet residue across the floor. She twisted right, gently reaching behind as Razzra continued lingering over her. She lifted the crystalline decanter of original precious soil from Ah’Ya close to her palm, carefully opening and tipping the vessel, catching a few grains, and then lapping the minute treasure into her face using her huge black tongue before securing the lid.
Chanting halted. Masotulama stilled, her eyes rolling back as she moaned for a few moments, and then went stiff again.
“What say you, Priestess of Taste? Is this Origin?” Razzra rested his arms as the holographs disappeared. All assembled remained in vigilant anticipation.
Masotulama sighed hard as her torso retracted inward, squeezed by agony. “No, my Commander. This world’s beings resemble Achaeans, but they are not from our Originator. This is not Ah’Ya. Forgive my failure.”
Razzra reached down with his glowing ring, searing flesh on the priestess’s exposed back as an act of tribal contrition, branding one empty square of her checkerboard service tattoo containing her ritual result history. She would integrate into breeding stock after ten more fruitless attempts, creating potential offspring with rare gifts of taste required for future planetary confirmation.
“My people,” he proclaimed, loudly, “Take what ores, food, and water we need from below. Gather new slaves as servants. We renew our sacred search for home. Let us find our beloved Ah’Ya.”
by submission | Jun 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
The old man sat with the shotgun in his lap. He sat in the wooden rocker facing the door. He had survived on this earth for eighty-seven years and when death came he would face it as he had lived, eyes open and hands full.
The wooden cabin had been built by the man more than sixty years ago when he first homesteaded the place in Alaska. He had carved out a life here living off the land fighting beasts and the Alaska elements his whole life. He was not surprised to be fighting one more thing for his survival.
The old man had not heard about the attacks on humans throughout the world until over the Ham radio he heard distress calls being thrown out on the regular. The creatures, never described the same way, seemed to be targeting humans. The descriptions varied but claws, tall, and serrated teeth seemed to be the most consistent. The word alien had been thrown around a lot, but ancient and from the deep were equally broadcasted.
The creek from under the rocker broke the quiet of the cabin. The rocker was handmade, a project the man spent time on for several long winter nights. He had built the chair when he was younger and his hands were not gnarled and twisted with age and overuse. It was something he was proud of and something he was glad to die in.
The door rattled and shook in the dim light from the kerosene lamp light. The north winter wind made the door rattle and shake like that but in the middle of fall, the winter storms had yet to make an appearance. The old man had on occasion had a grizzly interested in his cabin. The smells of an easy meal too hard for the predator to pass up. The door had shaken similarly, but more animalistic than the shaking that was happening now.
The door beat rhythmically and in a steady motion, something intelligent was testing and prodding the door, looking for a weakness to exploit. The old man had bolted the door from the inside. The sound stopped and the movement started at the windows. A gentle shutter and then a breaking of glass as the window exploded in on itself.
The old man had packed the glass all the way from Anchorage at the request of his new bride. She had said the cabin was too claustrophobic and so in a failed attempt to get her to stay he had packed the window into the backcountry.
The glass on the roughly hued floor sparkled in the lamplight creating little glass diamonds. The man could appreciate beauty when he saw it and he had seen a lot of it. The rise of the sun over mountains that had not been touched by the pollution of man. Rainbow trout rising for the first hatch of the season on a long-forgotten lake. The old man had experienced beauty and never stopped enjoying the small and meaningful moments it created.
The creature outside gave up on the windows finding the boards the old man had nailed over them too tough to penetrate. The creature’s movements around the cabin no longer veiled by attempted stealth. It stalked the cabin scratching and clawing trying to find a way in.
Then there was a long silence. The old man refused to break the silence with the sound from the rocker and instead held the quiet in reverence. He sat still and unmoving, hand gripping the shotgun. He knew the two shots the twelve-gauge over and under carried would not be near enough for what stalked him but he didn’t mind. He knew he would die tonight and like the Vikings of old, he would die with a sword in his hand.
The door exploded in a rage of splintered wood. The shock of it hit the old man and froze his finger on the trigger. There before him was a strange and terrifying beauty and like all the beauty in his life, he appreciated it. It was the last beautiful thing the old man’s eyes ever saw before darkness engulfed them forever.
by submission | Jun 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: Jenna Hanan Moore
What began as an ordinary morning walk with the dog did not remain ordinary for long. As usual, Thomas was oblivious to his surroundings. He didn’t notice the coolness of the breeze, the birds chirping, the pink and gold hue of the eastern sky, or the smell of the wildflowers.
Maggie, his golden retriever, was anything but oblivious. She didn’t care about the sunrise or the flowers, but her ears and nose drank in the sounds and smells of the birds and critters flitting about nearby. This path through the woods was her favorite walk.
When they reached the wooden footbridge near where the path curved towards home, a bright flash appeared in the sky, followed by a “whoosh!”
They stopped in their tracks. Maggie growled softly. Thomas looked at the sky. “Couldn’t be lightning. No thunder, and not a cloud in the sky.” He shortened Maggie’s leash. “Let’s go home. Maybe there’ll be something about whatever that was on the news.”
They crossed the footbridge and rounded the bend. Standing in the middle of the path was a sleek, black cylinder, about four feet high. A man dressed in silver stood beside it. “Your world will soon end. What will you do?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your world will soon end. What will you do?”
Thomas looked at Maggie. She’d stopped growling, and was wagging her tail at the stranger. He looked back at the stranger. “Who are you and how would you know a thing like that?”
“Pardon my lack of manners, but you haven’t much time and I didn’t want to waste any of it on pleasantries. My name is Aldous Alterian, and I saw your world end in a parallel universe.”
Thomas stared at the man, lost for words.
“I use Universe B62 for intergalactic travel. It physically parallels our own universe, but its laws of physics allow for travel faster than the speed of light.”
“That’s not possible,” Thomas stammered.
“It’s quite possible. I’ll show you.”
Aldous Alterian twisted a dial on the cylinder. Another flash, another whoosh, and they were in a spaceship with windows on all sides. To the left was a planet identical in appearance to Mars. To the right was the smoldering remnants of another planet.
Another twist of the knob, another flash, another whoosh, and they were back on the path through the woods.
“I discovered the time shift between universes on my last trip to your galaxy. I could explain, but you haven’t much time left. Do you really want me to waste it on the details of inter-universe temporal dynamics?”
“I guess not. How much time do we have?”
“That I cannot say. Could be months, could be weeks. It could be as much as a year or a little as a day. The important thing is to use it well. Will you do that?”
“I’ll try,” Thomas said.
“That’s all I ask.” With that, Aldous Alterian twisted the knob on the cylinder. A flash and a whoosh, and he was gone.
Thomas walked towards home, thinking of ways to make the world a better place. By the time he reached the house, his thoughts returned to the mundane tasks ahead of him. He abandoned his lofty plans, convinced they’d never work.
by submission | Jun 26, 2022 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
It should have been paradise; a warm, azure sea lapped the shore, separated from a verdant pseudoforest by a broad expanse of golden sand. When it came to xenobotany, this was as good as field trips got, and Maggie still couldn’t believe the grants committee had agreed to fund it.
Nevertheless, here she was, 27 light-years from home, notional leader of a university expedition to Sapphire, an Earth-like planet in the goldilocks zone of the star Marshall 4973. This island was part of a chain around the equator; the ubiquitous plant equivalents looked like giant tillandsia colonies, sucking moisture out of the warm humidity, the smaller piggybacking on the larger.
It should have been paradise; but it wasn’t. Down the beach, their biologist, Jack, was examining the tidal zone for signs of littoral life. He was only here because his post-doc supervisor had taken sick, and there was nobody else available to fill the slot. No doubt he was competent enough, but psych evals could still be wrong.
“Hey skip, whatcha got?” The voice in her earpiece was a sudden interruption. She glanced up at the sky, where the planet’s moonlets shone like diamonds.
“Hey Lucy. Plants. Or next best thing. How’re things upstairs?”
“Still doing the planetary mapping scans. Quiet up here.”
“We’ll be back later to liven things up. I won’t risk a night down here until we know what we’re sharing this place with.” And just what, she wondered, were the two women sharing the cramped space of their wormhole rider with?
“Don’t blame you. Much happier safe up here, me. Whoops, first run’s done, call you later!” Curious but timid, their pilot was so much like her own daughter May, long gone now.
She willed her attention back to the growth in front of her. Taller than she was, the blue stem had hard, scarlet spines as long as her forearm. A defence against something they hadn’t encountered yet, perhaps. Each point glistened with a clear ooze; she carefully swabbed the sticky substance onto a slide from her sample box, applied a coverslip, and popped it into her chem analyser. In two minutes she’d know what it was.
The problem with Jack, she realised, was that he was too much like the smirking thug whose name she refused to utter even in her thoughts, the one who’d taken her life’s joy from her. She remembered the sneering looks he’d darted in her direction as the judge droned on about “boys being boys” and let the lad off with a caution; May had withdrawn into herself even more afterwards, harder and harder to reach, until eventually she’d opened a vein in a warm bath and was gone forever.
The analyser beeped. Well yay for gloves, this stuff looked like a particularly nasty neurotoxin.
She’d seen Jack’s hungry glances at Lucy when he thought nobody was looking. What if he woke up before them when they came out of the wormhole, at the start of the long glide back to Earth? He could do something unspeakable; they wouldn’t find out until months later. She couldn’t run that risk. Project safety was one of her responsibilities, after all.
She carefully cut a spine off the plant. A terrible accident, she’d say; she’d warned him to be careful. He’d lost his footing and fallen backwards into the foliage, ripping his suit. So tragic.
She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, let another girl down. Taking a deep breath of the heavy air, she headed down the beach to where the unconcerned boy poked the wet sand, his back turned.
by submission | Jun 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Penn
As with many worlds in the Small Megallanic Cloud, Ah! presents intriguingly aberrant evolutionary features. The dominant species, dubbed “exploders” by early missions, has, over several million years, developed a unique response to danger.
Each individual possesses the ability to shatter into thousands of tiny fragments whenever threatened and reassemble itself once the threat has receded. Every exploder is made up of thousands of super-cells or particles, themselves made of microorganisms close in type to Earth biological cells. It is into these particles that an exploder disperses in the face of threat. Each particle contains sensory capabilities analogous to Earth animals’ sense of smell, and a hydrogen-based method of aerial propulsion, which together enable it to detect and propel itself towards other dispersed particles in the re-grouping process. The particles also have multiple lock-and-key cells, much as some Earth viruses do, which effect the final re-joining. Studies have shown that it is possible for an exploder to spread itself over an area up to two square kilometres, depending on the severity of the threat faced, and still recombine; though of course, the more widely the individual has been dispersed, the longer reintegration takes.
This adaptation worked well for the exploders in earlier stages of their evolution but, having aided their dominance, has itself come to present them with formidable challenges. So severe are these problems that the species has begun a population decline.
In their apex position, exploders no longer have natural predators. Neither do they seem to have developed the institution of war as most other advanced species do – presumably because any opposing exploder is almost impossible to destroy, except at a technological level Ah! has not reached – so they fear no intra-species attrition. The only real physical dangers they face are accidents, such as overturning carts, collapsing buildings, earthquake or lightning. But in the relatively benign environment of the exploders’ agricultural-level economy, on a stable and temperate planet, these events are infrequent.
However, the species’ flight response, instead of receding into the evolutionary background, has adapted in a rather unfortunate fashion.
As the level of threat surrounding the population has decreased, the sensitivity underlying the protective “exploding” reaction has increased. Thus it takes surprisingly little to set it off. Irrational fears in a dark place, for example, may be enough to make an exploder dismember. It may have what we call a nightmare and shatter into every corner of its dwelling. Simply tripping up in the street may prompt dispersal. In certain situations, it may feel insulted and instantly splatter its perceived adversary with tiny gobbets of itself – while the victim may well respond in kind. Given the time it takes each individual to regroup, this makes for a great many inconveniences. Meetings of any sort are frequently interrupted by spectacular self-disruptions. Public performances of Ah!’s rudimentary theatre or – to our ears, somewhat agitated – music sometimes have to pause while over-excited members of the audience re-amalgamate. Traumatized witnesses to crimes are almost impossible to regather, severely impeding criminal investigations, and domestic arguments often result in days of silent re-constitution. The problem has even redoubled as the exploders’ fear of exploding itself has become a trigger.
Reproduction too has become fraught, between partners who are often labouring under an apprehension that, at any second, they may spread themselves across an impractically wide area. So, with tragic evolutionary irony, it is the exploders’ own in-bred protection from danger that has become their greatest threat, and the sense of shallowly repressed hysteria and extreme over-caution that pervades Ah! has been sensed on arrival by many a troubled visitor.
