by submission | Sep 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Connor Yeck
Employee entry, Kennedy Space Center:
I don’t know if the other guys do this, but I like keeping records so I’m typing some things on my own terminal while we wait. Is personal stuff allowed? The rockets are past the point of alteration anyway, so there isn’t much to do.
Hoping my first project goes smoothly.
I guess it’s ironic or something to say that, as we’re trying to crash our hardware into the moon. But if we’re lucky, LCROSS* will give us a look at how much water is up there, and the impacts will throw up a cloud or maybe something even better to analyze. It’s hard trying to explain to my parents why this isn’t a waste of tax-money.
*LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite—we just know what it does, the details of acronyms tend to be forgotten around here)
We’re at the one minute mark, no one’s talking. It’s just like the movies.
There’s the first hit. Someone claps and we watch the figures. Second hit. Everyone’s cheering. It’ll be a while before we know anything, but the hardware made it, that’s all that matters.
I’m typing this in the evening.
It was a good day at the office, and we’re heading out for the night to celebrate. Further results will be checked tomorrow. There might’ve been bigger impacts than we thought, and are tracking an object heading out from the moon that could be a crater fragment. Should burn up. Still can’t believe I work here.
It’s morning. No one came in today, but I’m alive, which is good.
I think most of the cities are gone now. I’m sure we would’ve retaliated the same way, if a rocket had come through the roof of our world and landed in our president’s bed. The Lunars (some like the name Moonies (ugh)), are very scientific from what we can tell, and are sending a good deal of our own planet into the air for study.
Final note: mission success, results show water on moon.
by submission | Sep 7, 2013 | Story |
Author : Nils Holst
It had been five years since Theo had seen another human being, much less saluted one.
“Captain Theodore Holmes of Alpha Company, Third Colonial Marine Battalion?” asked the man with the holopad. He didn’t look up as he scrolled through the UNSS Sargazzio’s personnel list.
“Yes sir,” croaked Theo. The Sargazzio’s voice recognition software had failed over a year ago, he hadn’t spoken in months.
“Where’s your commanding officer?”
“I’m the only soldier aboard this ship sir. The rest of my battalion died on Ignis Magna.”
The man frowned and clicked off his holopad. He looked a bit soft around the middle. Too much time behind a desk.
“There were over eight hundred men listed on that manifest. You’re the only one left?”
“Yes sir,” said Theo. “Seven soldiers made it to the dropship, but I was the only one the Sargazzio’s autodocs could save.”
“You, ah… seem to be taking this pretty well captain.”
“It took the Sargazzio five years to get back here sir, I’ve come to terms with a few things. When will I be redeployed?”
The man shook his head and beckoned for Theo to follow him.
“I am Martin Ortega, or Admiral Ortega I suppose, if you insist on titles. I was promoted from postmaster to high admiral this morning for the express purpose of welcoming you back home. We don’t have much of a need for admirals these days, but we figured you’d appreciate the gesture.”
The space station was deserted, silent save for their footfalls echoing through the corridor. The sound had nearly driven Theo mad on his long flight home.
Ortega paused in front of a viewport, looking out at the massive hull of the Sargazzio. The pinnacle of military engineering when she was commissioned over eighty years ago, the ship had sixteen twin-mounted flak cannons, eight large-coil railguns, a suite of countermeasure lasers, four Grindlewald drives capable of sustained .9c, and enough life support for a full mechanized battalion. She had gone out accompanied by much pomp and circumstance, stuffed with soldiers and armed to the airlocks. She had come back a battered hulk, an ancient behemoth limping into dock on quarter power with holes the size of watermelons punched through her hull.
“The war is over,” Ortega said. “The treaty was signed the year before you landed on Ignis Magna, but even at near-light speeds most planets didn’t get stand-down orders for another couple years. The riots started when they declassified the casualty lists. Billions dead for no reason. The Colonial Defense Force was dismantled, the arms cartels overthrown. We’ve been at peace ever since. For decades we’ve kept this station operational, waiting as the warships trickled in. Waiting for you.”
“Me?”
“Your battalion was the last. After we’re done here the station will be demolished and the Sargazzio slagged. The world has moved on, the war is ancient history.”
Ortega turned away from the viewport and walked toward the receiving room.
“What happens now?”
“You’re discharged,” Martin said. “Let me be the first to congratulate you on surviving the Long War, now described as the biggest fuckup in human history. You’ll be in the media spotlight for a while, journalists and network commentators wanting to talk to the last returning soldier. But after a couple weeks you’ll be old news, and everyone will forget. You’ll see – things have changed. You may have only aged ten years, but the world you knew fell by the wayside decades ago.”
Silence filled the room.
“Did we win?”
“Does it matter?”
by submission | Sep 6, 2013 | Story |
Author : Amanda Schoen
I was at work when the chat program pinged. We weren’t supposed to take personal calls so I ignored it. Two seconds later it pinged again. And again. Oh hell. One conversation couldn’t hurt.
My sister’s handle popped up. <Mel, I have some bad news. Dad passed away.>
It was the sort of thing that warranted a phone call, so the words could dissipate in the ether. Instead they lingered in fuzzy black print on the screen.
Had he been sick? I didn’t know. It’d been eons since I called home.
Well. That was something.
I logged into my personal server and sent every picture I had. <When’s the service? I’d like to be there.>
The screen said my sister was typing. It took ages. I expected directions to the funeral home, the date of the ceremony. But when the screen blinked, her reply was short. <That’d be nice.>
She logged off without another word.
Well…people coped with grief in different ways. Maybe she just needed space. There’d be an obituary. Something in the paper that would have the details. I opened the browser and kept a tab open to the local paper.
It seemed disrespectful to just go back to work. Maybe I should hit a bar. Or call my sister back. There were probably things to do before the service…
But I couldn’t tear myself away from the computer. My sister might need space, but I just threw myself into work. There was something comforting about coalescing data. I’d been doing this for…I don’t know how long. A while. It’d become rote.
I took regular breaks to check if Dad’s obituary had made the paper yet. Nothing. So I sent a chat request to my sister until she responded.
<No, himself.> It was free to go in and get the scan, to store a copy of your memories on a hard drive. Accessing them later, now that got tricky. Most folks agreed to work for the storage company. Contract basis. Who wouldn’t do a year of labor—or ten, or a hundred—if it meant immortality?
And there were laws. You weren’t a piece of software; you had rights. You got email. The Internet. All the commercials showed happy families chatting away with their loved ones on their laptops. Some even set a place for the computer at the dinner table. What more could you want?
<Why?> It made no sense. You made your backup before you died. You didn’t even need to know how it’d happened, no memories of agonizing pain to haunt you. Most people spent their time plugged in anyway. They just carried on. Forever.
She paused. <It’s late. I should go.>
She logged off, leaving me to reread our stilted words, longing for a program that could parse them for deeper meaning.
Somewhere along the seventeenth time I checked the paper, the obituary popped up. It was short and sparse, each word measured against the cost of printing it:
Jean Phelps passed away at the age of eighty-six.
That wasn’t right. He’d just celebrated his seventieth birthday. We set the smoke detector off because I’d lit seventy little candles on the cake.
I read on:
He is survived by his wife Marie Phelps-Sanchez and his youngest daughter, Stephanie. His eldest daughter, Melanie, passed away sixteen years ago. He will be missed.
by submission | Sep 4, 2013 | Story |
Author : Mickey Hunt
“Welcome to the edge of the universe,” I said cheerfully. “The very edge.”
The clutch of tourists easing into my parent’s store seemed overawed. At night, part of our sky is lit with nebulae, pulsars, galaxy clusters, and all sorts of stuff, but the rest of the sky is black, pitch black. As far as anyone knows, no electromagnetic phenomena, gravity, or nothing ever emanates from out there.
“We’re stocked with souvenirs, snacks, drinks, contraband cigarettes, and camping supplies at wallet gouging prices,” I said as the customers fanned out among the aisles. “Hot showers cost a fortune per minute.”
“Excuse me, young fellow. Postcards?” the sweet little grandma asked.
I stepped around the counter to show her the rack for our best seller: a jet black card with the caption ‘Beyond the Horizon’.
“I’d like a dozen,” she murmured to herself.
Tourists. I don’t figure what they’ve come to see, but they know how to spend.
“Where’s the hotel?” a man in a sweater and shorts asked.
“Our planet doesn’t have hotels, sir, since it’s a park, except for the few concessionaires like us. If you want a room, you’ll have to stay a parsec or two closer toward the Center.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “We’ve come so far already.”
“We have plenty of camping spaces,” I said. “Campers bring lawn chairs, extra blankets, and sit up all night staring into the dark void.”
“Do you rent gear?”
“Whatever you need.”
#
Early in the offseason, two of my school buddies thought we should take an adventure. Dad owns a junker Galaxship that once carried the mail, so my friends and I took it apart, cleaned everything, recharged the quantum cells, put it back together with the safeties disabled, and loaded up all the canned beans, frozen steak, citrus concentrate, and beer it could hold. We charted a course directly away from the Center and launched.
At first it was fun. I mean, because even scientists never attempt this. Before long it got boring, but honestly, when we weren’t lifting weights and watching movies, or playing video games, we slept. Outside, absolutely everywhere was black, black, black as we traveled four years as close to c² as we dared.
Then one of my buddies, Janos, said, “We should stop.” So we did, and other than the ship not rattling and shaking, we’d have hardly known. We looked homeward to find that the universe had shrunk to an infinitesimal spark of light.
“Holy Higgs Boson!” Janos said. “We flew faster than we thought.”
I took a picture.
A quiet minute afterwards, my other buddy, Rasper, said, “I’m scared. Let’s go back now.” So, we did. The tiny dot of the universe grew until four years later (minus a month) our planet emerged into view.
When I walked into the store, Mom asked, “How was it?”
“Okay. I’m glad to be home. It’s not so bad here.”
“That’s how I felt,” Dad said. “You’re just in time. The tourist crush begins this weekend.”
Anyway, that picture I took of our infinitesimal spark? We couldn’t decide on a caption, but we make a ton of money from the new postcard regardless. Maybe, just maybe I can now afford to go someplace really fantastic and astonishing.
by submission | Sep 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : C.L. Guerrieri
I sat at the monitoring bay as he stood there, roughened hands folded calmly behind his stained, dark brown overcoat. His receded cheeks mostly hidden by a thin, graying beard and a matted ponytail, the captain smiled as his thinned eyes squinted out the front bridge window, glazing deeply at the ice asteroid field in front of him. The lasers burned into the pale blue ice as our tractor modules hauled them back into our cargo bay, emitting soft pings for every completed cycle.
My daydreaming was interrupted by soft words I almost didn’t hear.
“Please, speak your mind. Silence can only bring miscommunication,” he said.
He knew I was worried about being the only ones out here.
“Well, sir, it’s just—You know how our scouts can’t find cloaked ships. Being alone in null-sec doesn’t worry you?” I asked.
He maintained his gaze at me before shaking his head.
“Not in the slightest.”
This seemed like a horrible lack of planning, but I decided not to press. He always had a plan.
As if on divine cue, a half dozen dark beige shapes popped into view above the belt only a half-kilometer away. Their dark, spiny tips, typical of missile-loaded gunboats and stealth bombers, meant only one thing:
Pirates.
We were far too late for warp, but the crew did as usual, setting a warp course for a nearby planet. A warning light popped on in my panel, indicating that the worst of my fears had come true.
“They’ve scrambled our drives. Webbed our ignition too. We can’t escape.” I murmured.
“Not to worry,” came the calm response.
The main comm screen popped on, the static clearing to reveal a tanned, well-groomed, dark-haired head sneering at us with a hollow grin.
After no words from the captain, he began:
“You know how this goes down. We—“
The captain interrupted, holding up his hand, silencing the man at once.
“Glad you could join us, at last,” the captain calmly stated. “Today was becoming quite dull.”
The captain hit a small black button on the front dashboard of the bridge and, a moment later, numerous faded-blue Orion-class laser and missle gunboats warped in around us with dull thwumps.
The pirate’s face contorted and drained of color.
“FIRE!” the pirate screamed.
Their missiles released, but it was too late. The blue gunboats fired their lasers and missiles, detonating the pirate missiles prematurely as missiles ripped through the pirate hulls with bright-orange blooms, sending dull booms of pressure waves cascading over our hull.
As the blue ships realigned for another warp, the captain turned, sensing my anger at him.
“They,” pointing to the destroyed ships, “are, or were, experts at hiding. They needed something to draw them out. Besides, I don’t like to quit.”
“Please resume cycling whenever you are ready, Erin,” he said as he turned back toward the front viewing panel. I pressed a few buttons on my display as the dull hum picked up, casting the green arcs of light back out to the rocks. After what felt like too long, he turned and looked at me.
“You must be tired. Feel free to go rest.”
Grateful, I nodded and made my way towards the back of the bridge and turned as I walked out. He was still standing there, facing the asteroids, hands behind his back. He began humming a verse from a tune, an old naval song every miner knew as a rite of passage. I sang the verse in time with his humming in my head as I headed out.
Now the moral of this story is
As plain as plain can be,
Don’t ever trust a sailor
An inch above your knee.
