by submission | Oct 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rosalie Kempthorne
The creature was hideous. It was lopsided for one thing, and where its left arm should be there was only a stump. To say nothing of the slimy green tentacles that hung off its shoulder where a right arm was meant to go. Its misshapen face had one good – almost beautiful – eye, but the other was a bulging, white mess, and its chin drooped, green, in the way candle wax does when it melts. Even the clerk was staring at it with dismayed, somewhat helpless eyes.
This was definitely not what she had paid for.
The clerk was clearing his throat nervously. He barely mumbled out the words: “All care, of course, all care but no responsibility. I mean the thing is….”
“You are not serious?!”
“Well…”
Daphne rounded on him. He wanted to see a temper did he? Well, she could show him a temper. “I paid for a new husband! A new husband, you shrivelled up little hackla worm! Do you expect me to marry that?”
Was it her imagination or did the thing look almost hurt? No, it didn’t even look as if it could be sentient. Some heads were going to roll for this. She was a valued customer!
The clerk was starting to say, “Well, look-”
“No, you look. I want a proper husband, a replacement, and I want it asap.”
“It doesn’t work like that-”
“I don’t think it works at all!” She couldn’t quite bring herself around to looking directly at certain parts of it she doubted would be functional.
“The contract you’ve signed, you see,” and he clearly, clearly wished he were anywhere else but here in this room, “the customer bears the responsibility in the rare incidence of failure.” He looked as if he was about to transmit her a copy of the document.
“I know what I signed. But do you call this fit for purpose? Do you think any women in the known galaxy is going to take this on as her husband?”
“Well, I don’t know…. I mean he’s got one very nice eye….”
Silver and emerald. Just like she remembered. Sure, gazing into just that…. But then the other one swivelled to look at her. Digusting.
“I’m very sorry Ma’am but a replacement….”
“I should think so-”
“….would require full payment.”
“I’ll be making a complaint.”
Relieved. Of course he looked relieved, this was about to sail right over his head, off his shoulders, and onto somebody else’s desk. He said “There’s a form. And if you want to order another….”
“Huh! Believe me, I’ll be taking my business elsewhere!” She turned on her heel, tossing her head for dramatic effect.
“Ma’am…..” He was gesturing at the thing.
“Do you really expect me to take that with me?!”
“Well, it’s just…”
The thing turned its head to look at her. In her husband’s dead voice: “Daphne.”
“You see…” the clerk was going to try and explain about the memory implants, the bonding process.
“That’s your problem!” she fired back.
And the thing said “Hello darling, how was your day at work?”
by submission | Oct 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Your hot coffee, sir,” says the Inteeri waiter as he places the beverage on the table in front of me.
“Thanks. Here’s–” The short alien that looks vaguely like an anthropomorphic armadillo shuffles away before I can offer him a tip. At no time while serving me does he make eye contact. That was out of respect. And fear. I’m nobody important. Just a struggling writer. My waiter probably has more money in the bank than I have. But in his eyes — all six of them — it doesn’t matter. I’m a member of the galaxy’s most terrifying species. I’m human.
My old man was part of the delegation that made first contact with the Inteeri. The aliens weren’t sure if mankind posed a threat to them so their top military officials were tasked with the initial assessment of the human race. On a space station orbiting Inteer Secundum, my dad and the other human ambassadors met with the alien generals and admirals. One of the human delegates had a slight cold. He sneezed once during the meeting. An hour later the entire Inteeri High Command were dead. The earthly rhinovirus proved instantly lethal. With their military command gutted, the Inteeri political leaders unconditionally surrendered to Earth despite the reassurances of a distraught and horrified humanity that the Inteeri deaths were an unintended tragedy.
Someone or something jostles me as it moves past. Some of my coffee spills onto the table. I turn in my chair to come face to face with a rather surly looking Kordann. The creature’s eyestalks quickly withdraw from a beligerent extension to a submissive retraction as its leathery skin turns blue with fear.
“Ten thousand pardons, master,” the Kordann says through its translation device as it glides away on six tentacles, bowing in apology.
Humans made contact with the Kordann ten years after the disastrous Inteeri encounter. Again, the Biomedical Assessment Team determined there was little danger of contagion between the species. Nonetheless, the Earth delegates wore environment suits as a precaution. As the human ambassador walked up with his hand extended to the Kordann prime minister, he tripped. The Earthman’s hand struck the Kordann leader’s trachea, killing the latter. The details of this event bore a more than passing resemblance to a passage in the Kordann Book of Scripture prophesying a visitor from the heavens who would kill a Kordann ruler and establish a monarchy on their world. The religious-minded Kordann quickly submitted.
And so it would go for Mankind’s emmisaries to the stars. The Scottish brogue of Earth’s ambassador to the Relvet would result in “We come in peace and brotherhood” being mistranslated as “Surrender and serve, or die.” In the wake of the fall of both Inteer Secundum and Kordanna, the Relvet surrendered.
On Basura VII, the representative from Earth accidentally knocked over his water glass short-circuiting the computer that managed the Basuran Stock Exchange. A crippling recession and humble request that Basura VII be admitted to the growing Terran Empire followed. The Supreme Monarch of Juppnoi, finding himself trapped on a conference table by the barking Maltese dog of the Earth diplomat, abdicated the throne and turned the Juppnoi Kingdom over to Terran control.
Humanity now dominates much of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. But we’ve turned over all further first contact and diplomatic missions to our extraterrestrial vassal states. A population of 50 billion subjects, none of whom we wanted, is more than enough.
by submission | Sep 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
THE SENTINEL
They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.
EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.
by submission | Sep 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cole
“Watch out for that kid!”
Tanya swerves, kicking the drive gear into second. Our hover skimmer chugs left, close cropping a row of season’s end corn. She nudges the engine to a full stop and settles in the field.
Trash spills out of the can the kid was loading. He stands in his front yard, eyes wide, as the craft door opens and first I, then Tanya, emerge, removing our flight helmets. His camo pajamas are filthy, fraying at his ankles.
“Are you okay?!”
He continues to gape.
Tanya places her hand on my shoulder. “He ain’t bleeding, come on. We’ve got a deadline.”
Turning on his heel, he hits the porch at rocket speed, hollering, “Women from space!”
I run a hand through my long blonde hair and laugh.
*
“Y’all were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, Delia,” Squib snarls, his men unloading the cargo from the rear of the skimmer.
“We ran into a kid in a field”, I shrug.
“After you stopped at a bar?” Squib fishes a sequined bra out of the front floor board.
“Didn’t have a drop,” Tanya grins.
“A drop of liquor at least.”
Squib hands me the bra which I hold up to my flat chest, wiggling my hips until he cracks a smile.
“Worth it, then?”
“Hey, boss!”
The cargo foreman waves Squib over, a pleased look on his face.
“These’ll sell like hot toasties!”
*
“Like this,” Tanya says, showing the Anolian child how to blow bubbles through the ribbed pink plastic wand. The soap bubbles swirl through the purple air.
She laughs, her facial feelers scenting the air.
“Fizzy,” she squeaks.
Her parental polyp buys three bottles.
“I can’t believe they were such a good price,” I say, my skirt twirling as I dance through the slowly exploding incandescent spheres.
“They’re just not that popular Terra-side anymore.”
*
As I watch from the cover of trees, the hover skimmer hid, the kid in the camo pajamas picks up my gift.
“I thought aliens left better presents,” he comments idly, pulling out a yellow wand.
It hangs in his hand idly, a few bubbles dribbling through the lighter gravity. When he cracks a smile, I smile in return.
Some things are universal.
by submission | Sep 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
It’s rotating. It doesn’t look like it, but instruments show that it is. Right now it takes around 24 hours to complete one rotation. Since it’s just over two miles in diameter at its center, the amount of centrifugal “gravity” being generated right now is negligible. That’ll change. The drivers will keep slowly increasing the spin until it’s rotating once every two minutes. That will make the pseudo-gravity 0.45 g. It’ll take most of a year to get it spinning that fast. No matter. I’m in no hurry.
Even now, with the thing less than complete, it’s a work of art. Nearly ten miles long and perfectly rounded at both ends, it’s hard to believe it used to be three gigantic asteroids.
I make way stations. And while there’s an unfathomable amount of engineering that goes into them, anyone who says it isn’t art is a liar or a fool. You can’t totally rely on the equations to tell you what the proper land-to-water ratio should be. The hull specs that will block hard radiation while still greedily gathering up ordinary light to illuminate the interior? Your AI will get you pretty close, but there’s always a small gap between theory and practice. And it takes instinct to bridge that gap.
It’s surprising how many people think we’ve always used way stations in interstellar travel. We haven’t. During the first hundred and fifty years of extrasolar travel, various methods were attempted to get across the gulf between the stars. Suspended animation. Multi-generation ships. Near-light speed schemes. Not one explorer made it to his destination alive.
What can go wrong on a space mission within Earth’s solar system? A technical failure. Psychiatric issues. Medical emergencies. Radiation contamination of food or water or living space. Now extend that mission from tens of millions or a billion miles to one that has to cover multiple trillions of miles. The law of averages wins. Something going catastrophically wrong becomes all but certain.
The first way station halfway between Earth’s system and the Alpha Centauri system was small and fairly unimpressive by modern standards. The crew on the first attempt to reach Proxima Centauri after the station came online barely made it. They spent four months there effecting repairs to their ship and relaxing in an environment that at least approximated being outdoors on Earth. Now there are six stations equidistant between Sol and Proxima. It takes most of 10 years to make the trip, but you have a month or two every 18 months of the journey at one of the stations. You’re not trapped in the same spaceship for a decade. You’re never more than 18 months away from a giant O’Neill cylinder with forests and lakes and deserts.
Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani: They all have a string of way stations reaching back to Sol. And no two way stations are alike. You might explore a jungle on one station and participate in a snowball fight on the next one.
I’ve been working on this station for most of 20 years. A siliceous asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid, and a metallic asteroid. Bolt them together and fling them out of the asteroid belt and command nanotech machines like a conductor directing a symphony as you travel out between the stars. Twenty years and now the first way station between Sol and Procyon is almost ready. I’ve modeled the beach and sea on Destin, Florida. White sand and emerald water. And an artificial sun illuminated by concentrated starlight. You need that on an 88 trillion mile journey.
