by submission | Mar 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
Fingers scraped against hard ground, seeking a handhold against the sulfuric winds that battered against the environmental suit. The sky rumbled with cold lightning, and hail battered the suit’s graphene plating, begging for entry as if it needed to escape the storm itself. Moments passed through the excruciating chaos. Hand over hand, the figure within the suit pulled themselves along, instincts completely driving their actions as they crawled about looking for shelter. They would find none. Against this barren, toxic wasteland, there could be no victory.
She kept moving away.
Some faint part of her thought she might stumble upon a crash site. Her own, maybe, or that of some other crew pulled into the gravity well of this wretched planet.
This monster, a strange and inhospitable amalgam of terrestrial planet and gas giant, had devoured its latest prey. Her ship was gone, she knew, ripped to shreds in the upper atmosphere. Her escape pod had barely managed to reach the surface, crashing violently and tossing her haphazardly down a crumbling hillside. She would be dead, had not the howling updrafts somehow blunted her fall.
Now, she was alone.
Her body ached, and her communicator was silent. No other escape pods had launched, the rest of the crew trying desperately to keep the ship together as it plunged towards the surface. Her cowardice had saved her life.
“But for what?” she thought, hands gripping the rock face more tightly.
Darkness enveloped her, broken only by periodic, violent flashes of lightning.
“On,” her body urged her, adrenaline still churning within her. “On. Survive.”
Her arms and legs continued moving of their own accord, half-climbing, half-crawling ever forward. The sediment, if you could call it that, was rapidly building around her – little chunks of rock, ice, and crystal blown about by an endless storm, collecting in huge drifts against the jagged, icy mountains that towered over her.
“On, on,” her body fought back against the analysis in her mind. “Don’t think, just move.”
But what was the point?
She wasn’t a geologist, just another space jockey hoping to make a quick buck on the interstellar market. She’d been the one to suggest this route, everyone mistaking her greed for some uncanny confidence or bravado. They all know the reputation of this planet. They knew it devoured ships with an almost ravenous hunger. They all went along with her anyway.
“Stupid fools,” she thought, slumping down in a prone position, hands over her head to buffer herself against the wind and crystalline hail.
She hadn’t been brave, hadn’t been clever. She was just another foolhardy idiot risking lives for a little gravity boost.
Now they were all dead, and she was stuck here, waiting for the planet to take her too.
The storm would strip the environmental suit away, bit by bit, it’s graphene slowly becoming one with the debris thrown about by the storm, spreading over the surface of this harsh world. Her body would be next. Her flesh would be stripped from her bones, and before long, the bones themselves would be battered, crushed, and churned into powder. Her presence scrubbed clean from a planet that had never welcomed her in the first place.
“Fight,” her body said weakly, but all she could do was pull into a tighter ball on the ground.
She knew her fate. Either her oxygen would run out, or she would lose containment. There were no other choices.
In the end, she would be just another victim, swallowed by the monster planet.
by submission | Mar 9, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian C. Mahon
It takes Zax only one external sponson rotation after crawling out the sleep sack to yell, “Du’! This is complete crap!” Jackass throws a wrench at Viewscreen One, which, lucky us, I put a shield over.
“’Ey man, cut the gorbaj! We use that! I get it, dig? But we can’t cut orbit ‘til we got enough coin, and we can’t get enough coin ‘til we been here long enough to earn it.”
Zax turns red, then kinda purple, cheeks turning almost as purple as his hair. He tries to shove a cut-fingered glove in my face. Maybe if auto-grav worked, I’d take him seriously, but it’s hard to take a dang ol’ serious when rotating three-sixty.
“No! That’s not the problem! We’re stuck with this cut-rate planet’s bull eccentricity so’s we can’t work planet-side but half the time! We gotta wait out in this floating hovel ‘til the company slings us back on intercept, and while we waitin’, Novabus rate hikes coverage so we gotta stay out here even longer!”
I shrug. Novabus Insurance did hit all us exo-miners with a three percent increase. He ain’t wrong either about waiting. JupiCorp never sends pushers out on time, and we always at the pusher’s mercy to catch “Herbie” (HR 5183s if so inclined) on its return path to the survivable zone.
“I donno what to tell ya. Remember Hansen Jo Hanson? Man didn’t pay his insurance. Man didn’t pay to maintain his boosters, never upgraded control instruments when Skyward Tech pushed new software, never did a dang ol’ that cost him more ‘an he saw fit. Then what happened?” I push my bandana up so he can catch me staring.
“Well, yeah, things went bad for him.”
“Bad? C’mon Zax! Mans blew up! Booster flamed up his b-hole an’ sent him cartwheelin’ off the ionosphere! Bet Novabus heard all about that! Bet that’s why all us got tagged! You remember if Nova paid for it?”
“Naw an’ hell naw! Nova didn’t pay a dim!”
“That’s ‘cause he din’t get upgrades! That’s the model there, Z,” I says, tapping the side of my dome. “Insurance knows. Planned colony builders pay Jupi and the rest o’ the excavators for material close to the world sites, Jupi pushes money to Skyward and other manufactorums, businesses follow colonist money, and Novabus and their ilk keep an eye on ‘em all to figure who to leech money from ‘for safety’. ‘Oh, no update? Check page seven eighty-two of your re-entry supplement. See? That’s a hard no on payout.’ I mean, we just pit stops for the money train. Earnin’s never stay in hand long enough to look at, and we get just enough overhead to keep from gettin’ too ornery.”
“Yeah! Exactly! Meanwhile we gotta stay on scrap planets like Herbie just to get enough to get out!”
“Meantime, we make more money for Jupi, to give to Skyward, to give to Nova.”
Zax rolls his eyes. “Its such phage work.”
Knowing he’ll chew on this until he’s asleep again, I pull the bandana over my eyes. Can’t and won’t disagree with him. Life hanging out in a half-broke twenty-foot tube waiting on someone paid less than us isn’t exactly my childhood dream.
Viewscreen Two shows anti-grav’s on its fifth reboot, and Zax’s looks like he’s working the pre-start sequence to sobbing over the situation again. He’ll figure it out. Took me a couple orbits, but I learned, sometimes it’s just better to float on by. Soon as I hear the sniffle, I mutter, “’ey man. Welcome to the circle of life.”
by submission | Mar 6, 2022 | Story |
Author: William Kee
Captain J. P. Koontz was locked in the munitions bay. It was freezing. Thank God, I brought the suit. Soon he would need to put the helmet on. The crew was outside banging on the door.
“Give it up, Cap. We’ve turned off all life support except the oxygen. You’re going to freeze to death in there.”
Koontz shouted back, “I told you, you’re not taking this ship from me. She’s mine!”
“You know you didn’t give us a choice. Come on out now,” Carter’s voice held the anger and resentment it had since they left Earth. They won’t wait out there for long.
“If I come out, it’ll be with a phaser in each hand.” Koontz moved as he talked. They had taken control of the bridge, but he’d been able to do a complete lockout of the munitions bay and opened the weapons cases before his clearance was revoked. This room was his. If they want it, they’ll have to come in and take it. Koontz removed a single block of plastic explosives from the lockbox. It was soft in his hand and easy to mold and press into the seams of the exterior wall. He shouted over his shoulder, “Hey, Carter, how many of you are out there?”
“All of us. So you come out with however many phasers you want. It won’t make a difference. You can’t win.”
“I think you and I have different definitions of winning.” The sound of Carter typing into the keypad on the outside of the door was audible through the cold metal. They’ll be through soon. Koontz connected the wire between each packet of plastic explosives. He put his helmet on and turned it to lock it in place. Then, holding the detonator in his hand, he crouched down behind one of the large boxes of munitions secured to the floor of the hold and waited.
The door chimed and then hissed as it opened. The crew stood there in the doorway trying to get a look into the room. Captain Koontz made eye contact with Carter through the suit helmet. Carter’s eyes grew wide in fear and Koontz said, “I tried to tell you,” and activated the detonator. The sound disappeared along with the crew into the vacuum of space. Koontz was sucked back against the secured box for half a second before all the air was gone from the room. He floated through the door of the compartment and sealed it behind him, doing the same through each door as he made his way to the bridge. When he sat down in his chair the computer announced that the remainder of the ship had been pressurized. Koontz took off his helmet and said, “Computer, confirm I am alone aboard this ship.”
“Confirmed.”
Captain Koontz shook his head and said to the empty bridge, “Looks like I won. I tried to tell them.”
by submission | Mar 5, 2022 | Story |
Author: Kaci Curtis
You said that everything was going to change. I remember where we were sitting, sand clumped between our toes. I remember being afraid. Not of you; never of you. But of the picture of inevitability that you painted upon a rough and murky canvas.
“Everything will be different,” you warned.
And it was. The world took a turn that was so sudden, so irrevocable, we may as well have jumped off a cliff and tried to fly. Well, some of us tried to fly. The rest just fell, screaming all the way down.
You said that it would get better soon. We sat in the shadow of a crumbling bridge. A stringy bird charred over our fire. The darkness was full of enemies.
I remember scoffing when you said it. For the first time, I didn’t believe you. Nothing was going to get better. And you, once a mountain of a man, became a liar in my eyes. Because you couldn’t trust me with the bitter, relentless truth.
Fathers and daughters were supposed to trust each other. You feared that I would break; run screaming into the night and become of a victim of those who wanted what little I carried in my pockets. So you lied to me.
And in the same breath, you lost the parts of me that cared.
You said that I needed to be more careful. We soaked in a stream, scrubbing the blood from our clothes. I was humming a song from back before it all went silent. Your warning went unheeded; it was useless to me. I’d been careful for too long.
I wanted to be careless, to run shouting through the trees and draw them all to me, for miles and miles. I wanted to find the edge of the world and sail right off of it. To put an end to this monotony.
You could see my restless spirit, like prey trembling on exhausted legs just beneath my skin, jumping at the smallest noise.
“Be careful,” you cautioned.
As if I had a choice. As if my cavernous soul and rotting mind was something small to be swept away by the current; cleansed and forgotten.
But I was too often hunted, too often hungry, and far too gone.
You said that you were sorry. I was lying in a casket of mud when you finally found me. Someone had taken my knife and bundle of snare wire. They’d left me with a deep gash across my stomach.
You said that you should have been there to protect me. That had never changed, even when everything else spiraled into something savage and unrecognizable. There was still a father and a daughter, and a desire to live.
Except that I lost mine, didn’t I? I think so. I think it fell off that cliff I was seeking and didn’t have anything to grab on the way down.
What else was there to do, when the world as we knew it ended and everyone lived off what they could steal from others? When food became as scarce as good water and there was nowhere safe to sleep? When the electronics that we’d let devour us went dark and half of us didn’t know how to start a fire? What else was there to do but to falter, crash, and break apart?
You said that you were sorry, and clutched my hand. And I would have told you that I was sorry, too. That I had fought to stay with you.
But I’d already gone.
by submission | Mar 3, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
The end, it seems, is nigh.
I stare at the billboard strapped over the old man’s chest, telling me to repent of my sins before the apocalypse comes. Crudely written scripture verses surround big, bold letters saying “REPENT!”
I haven’t been to church since I was seven. I couldn’t tell you what any of the verses were in reference to, nor could I say with certainty that any of the books listed are even in the Bible. Mostly I’m just shocked that anyone actually has access to one of these signs in this day and age, and that anyone would take the time to patrol the streets the day before the asteroid hits.
“Repent!” he says. As if humanity has anything to repent for.
We’ve come so far in the last 100 years. Poverty is gone. Hunger, war, and disease have all been eradicated. People still die of chronic conditions, genetic defects, even some rare outbreaks of personal violence. But plague? Crime? These are things of the past.
Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds. Philosophy and experience has taught us how to use this technology for the good of all. The Earth is unified in a way that our ancestors never would have thought possible. Borders are a formality, and racism is confined to only the darkest corners of the world. After tens of thousands of years of struggle and hardship, mankind has finally come into its own. United and strong.
Now one rogue asteroid, set on its course for earth thousands of years ago, is going to end it all. And all this man can think to say is, “Repent!”
I glance down at the bag in my hand, filled with food my wife is going to use to prepare a last meal for our family. My son and daughter don’t fully understand what is happening. We haven’t had the heart to explain it to them. Better for them to die in a flash than sit quietly pondering their own mortality. We’re going to give them one last night of joy, tuck them in for the night, and then pray that death finds us before they wake up the next morning.
Now, instead of walking the rest of the way home, I stare at the man across the street, my blood boiling. How dare he stand in judgment? What moral superiority could he possibly have to justify his actions? What sins does he suppose we committed to deserve this?
He’s just a blind, stupid fool unable to cope with the inevitable.
I step up to him, wanting to tell him off, wanting to yell and scream and tell him that his God never did anything for the world but plunge it deeper into the darkness.
But then – quite of their own accord – my lips starts forming words that lack any of the venom and vitriol my id so desperately wants to unleash.
“I know you are scared,” I say, looking into the man’s eyes, which I see – now that I am up close – are on the brink of tears. “I don’t know why you are out here. Maybe your religion is all you had growing up. Maybe you’re clinging desperately to anything that might give you a glimmer of hope. Or maybe you’re just lonely.”
The man lets out a deep exhale, the tears welling up in his eyes.
“You aren’t alone,” I say. “You have me.”
My bag of groceries falls to the ground as the man unexpectedly hugs me, the flimsy billboard bending between our bodies. We hold the hug for some moments, unspoken emotions washing between us, before finally breaking.
In the end, he joins my family for dinner and sleeps peacefully on our couch as my wife and I wait for the end. We face the catastrophe in the same way mankind has learned to face all its challenges.
Together.
