by submission | Jan 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : John Kinney
Food. His stomach is a knot, coiling together tighter and tighter each day. Food. He has not eaten in almost a month, his blue eyes are sunken in his pale face, his scraggly black hair hangs down to his thin shoulders and his thick beard is long and full.
Food is all he can think about.
The world in front of Jack Stramm is ice and snow. Snow fell in torrents for months, covering the old world, trapping millions in their homes, all had hoped that it would end sooner, that it would go away with the summer. But the snow fell and didn’t stop for months.
Now Jack trudges across the snow in makeshift snowshoes. Behind him he drags a sled full of old camping gear. He is weary. Thin clouds of mist cover his view with each shallow breath, and he scans around the frozen tundra, knowing he will see nothing, but hoping for anything.
He comes across a body. A frozen mass heaped in the snow. Jack stands over it and sways, his sunken blue eyes wide. The body has blue skin, and Jack cannot tell if it is a man or a woman. Food, thinks Jack.
The camping gear behind him is covered in a thin frost, which breaks away as he unzips the small, front pocket and pulls out a pocketknife. He falls to his knees in front of the body and his hand hovers over its exposed arm, shaking violently. But it isn’t the cold gush of wind that sweeps light snow across the frozen surface that chills him to his core.
His eyes open again, and his daughter stands over the body that lies in the snow.
“Baby,” he says out loud. “Baby I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, baby”
She says nothing and stands there, watching him and watching his shaking hand hover over the arm of the body in the snow.
Jack weeps and closes his eyes. In a fleeting moment of despair he tosses the knife down, and he howls upwards toward the sun.
“Save me!” he shouts. “Save me now!” His eyes ache from staring into the light and he bows his head. “Why don’t you stop this?” he mutters.
In the darkness of his thoughts, he hears a soft voice.
“Come home, Jack.”
He sits on his knees in the snow, his eyes open but blank. He reaches down for the knife and cuts out a small chunk of flesh. Although it is cold, the body has been resting in the sun and is warm enough to slide a knife through.
“I’ll find you, baby” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll find you and we can leave this place.”
He slides the cold flesh into his mouth and swallows it quickly. A cloud passes over the sun and he is enveloped in the shade.
by submission | Jan 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
Pressure surge from the Reece tube flung slaters from the nozzle. I batted them away into space with a dirtied glove.
“While you’re there, get rid of them too!”said Captain Boscobel over comm.
I worked Dockmouth, the parking garage for a bastardised space station called the Dock.Built by orbital robots from spent rocket boosters, decommissioned satellites and frozen astronaut shit, it was at best shambolic. Dockers ranged from spacefaring cyber-hippies to pseudoscientists and FIFOs. All suckling at the intoxicating teat of a lawless frontier.
I moved here after EarthDay43, when an asteroid fractured our Moon. It changed Earth forever and turned the Dock into a budget staging post for humanities propagation into deep space.
Crab-bots teased slaters from micro-meteorite gashes in Boscobel’s hull. Storing them in operable faulds along their flanks. Creasey’s Galley would credit me handsomely for their tasty innards.
Through my scratched visor extended Dockmouth’s berthing deck. Like a frozen wave of debris, it gently arced for a mile into space. It was interrupted randomly by ships of various shapes and sizes attached like suckling pigs.
Facing away from Earth, Dockmouth’s solemn darkness changed as the moon broke Mouthside. Shadows shrouding locking clamps and airlocks became diluted with a clandestine hue. Witching hour had returned as we caught up with the moon.
Moonbeams reflecting off Dockmotes flickered as a ship of shadows appeared from nothing and approached the far berth. Refuel credits logged, so I left Boscobel to the crabbots and jetted for the strange ship.
Approaching cautiously, I rendezvoused with a Reese tube, escorting it aft to an inconspicuous point on the seamless hull. To my amazement, the nozzle disappeared below the shadowy skin and fuel flowed immediately.
“Sponge, you old juice pusher!”
I flinched as I pictured my frightful facial scars. Soolong’s tinny voice had reawakened horrible memories of our last SpaceCore posting on the moon when the asteroid hit. Soolong literally became half the man he was.
“Slug, you old juice burner! It’s been years. Nice ship! Is black the new black?” I said, struggling to control my anxiety.
“Sorbnets Sponge! and you can call her Betty”
Docktalk whispered of a new dark tech that thrived on enemy fire. Operating within the slip-field fissures born from battle energy. Soolong must have reenlisted.
“Sorbnets? Thats dark energy isn’t it Slug?”
Suddenly comms went down. A bright light, moving at rail speed, lit up Dockmouth like a guzzling fire eater. It slammed into Slug’s ship, turning the sorb-net near me transparent as power transferred to the impact site on the opposite side. Beneath the matt black hull was a glowing latticework supported on armour plating. Nauseous from my high-G escape manoeuvre, I braced for chaos.
Moonbeams shimmered again as another sorb-net ship appeared. I searched frantically for a survivable vector but I knew any ship to ship weapon exchange this close was terminal.
Comm reinstated and laughter bellowed from multiple sources.
“Should have seen your face Sponge!” Slug laughed.
The second ship slowed to approach speed and berthed.
“He took off like a rabbit!” Laughed the second ship’s Captain.
“Sorry Sponge, but out on Europa, I heard you were Dockside. I thought I might drop by
and see if you still had some Core left in you”
“You bastard Slug. I’ve popped my catheter and now I’m swimming in piss”
“Well I’ll buy you a coldie and we can call it even. And while we’re at it, I’ve got an offer that
involves a long journey, a Captain’s hat and a sorb-net ship called Barbara”
by submission | Jan 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Willis Weatherford
Weighty darkness pushed in on the edges of the cavern, craving admittance to the subterranean council meeting. Eight faces made ominous by three weeks of beard growth stared across the glowrods at one another. Blued gun barrels, gripped tightly, glinted softly, and the steady flow of an installed stream gurgled up from a crack in the floor, like the last bloody breaths of a dying animal. They were the Remnant.
“Chronos, how long until sunrise at our entrance point?”, inquired Achilles with a quick glance at the timekeeper. Chronos had been an executive before the Excavation and Descent, and owned the only working watch. His detail oriented mind was also adept at estimating the two times that still mattered: sunset and sunrise.
“Five minutes until the sun first touches the horizon.” They had quickly discovered – all of them – that the Excavators could still function in the pre-dawn sunrise glow. Only direct light sent them lumbering underground.
“Good.” Achilles rubbed his heel, injured in a past foray. He had chosen his “Nom de Bellum”, as they called their new names, for just that reason. One of the first things they had done after the Excavation was cut out the subdermal IDNodes and change their names. Both had been crimes against the State before the Excavators emerged. Now, there was no State to enforce the Universal Identification Act of 2063, and any connection to the DataBase was a death sentance.
“We top out in one minute, arrive at the target at 0 past sunrise, extract Citizens 11 and 12 within two minutes, reboard as soon as possible, and hopefully return by 8 past sunrise.” Everyone seated around the glowrods was familiar with this routine by now. Everyone except citizens 7 and 8, now renamed Guns and Bolts, had been on at least one or two successful rescue missions. Guns and Bolts had been on only one, a failed attempt to extract citizens 9 and 10. They had been Guns’ friends. He glowered in the monochrome light, eyes sunken and red.
“Remember,” Achilles said with a new weight in his voice, “more than two is not an option. Gravity will not allow it. Only 11 and 12, nobody else. Ok. Let’s move out.”
Eight pairs of boots stomped through the grey dust towards the surface. At the hatch, they donned tanks, and regulators, and headlamps. The hatch opened, the cold rushed in, and they walked out onto the dark surface. A few miles away, they could see the familiar band of sunlight right where it always was, highlighted on the circular rims of craters. A few steps brought them to the only remaining functional vessel: StateProbe 21. They clambered inside, buckled in, and blasted off towards the earth. As they hurtled through space, Chronos could see the Moon quickly diminishing behind them from one window, and the earth quickly growing in another. They were headed straight for the line between terrestrial day and night, light and darkness. Then he caught Achilles’ eye. The old man, once a maintenance worker at a city park, gave a grim smile, and gave a familiar speech:
“Rescue Mission 5 is underway. May we bring new souls from the terror of light into the safety of darkness. May each man count it a glory to blow even one Excavator off the surface of our planet. May our return add a few more to the the Remnant.”
by submission | Jan 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Liz Shannon Miller
When she opens her eyes, she expects…
Well.
She doesn’t expect to be in space.
At first she’s floating, adrift, the starlight from far away galaxies flickering into her view as she waves her fingers across the void.
She fell asleep so normally. Well, abnormal for her, because it actually meant sleep. Real sleep, head on the pillow before 3 AM, not worried about the heart palpitations she’d experienced a few weeks before. Not worried about the hundred problems that haunted her, the other hundred things that she used to distract herself from those problems.
As she’d fallen asleep in her bed, for a rare moment, she’d felt peace, escape from the mental disorders and medications she used.
And now, she was here.
It takes her a while to wonder if she’s naked, but when she decides to check, she discovers she’s not. She can’t really focus, though, on what she wears — at one moment, it’s red and black spandex, then baggy orange comfort, then black skintight leather. She shifts, in and out, echoing so many things she’s loved. So many things she hasn’t left behind.
It doesn’t surprise her that the prism through which she saw this experience was the science fiction she loved, because that prism was a prescription engrained into her glasses. But that was simply how she saw the world. The corrective features almost secondary.
Eventually, a framework coalesces around her. A ship. She’d never been the best driver, or maintainer of automobiles. But she pilots this ship like a pro as the cockpit comes together, as she finds herself gripping the wheel. She’s a fabulist, she knows that a spaceship wouldn’t drive like a car would. But she’s at the helm, and she’s ready to go.
Through the stars, she soars. She never expected to be in heaven.
But she is.
by submission | Jan 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Eric Spery
The starship’s Captain stood in the causeway between the dining module and the guest berths. As he stared at the observation port, one of the guests came through from the berths.
The captain knew every passenger he carried on the two month run between Sol and Betelgeuse. This passenger was an old retired military officer from Terra. Just a few years older than himself.
He stopped and stood beside the Captain and stared through the glass at the tapestry of unmoving stars.
“They’re so much more beautiful here,” he said with a slight trace of an accent that the Captain couldn’t place.
“What are?”
“The stars. I’ve never been outside the Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve spent my adult life in cold foxholes looking up at the twinkling stars through the smoke of battle, praying I would live long enough to see the stars again the next night. Praying some day I might leave for good. Leave for the stars and never return.”
“Are they everything you hoped for, sir?”
“They are, Captain. I thank you for taking me on my last journey. To stars that no longer twinkle.”
The old soldier solemnly shook the Captain’s hand and then continued on towards the dining module.
After the portal closed, the Captain turned back to the observation port. How long had it been since he’d noticed the
stars outside? The only thing he saw anymore was his own reflection: old, tired and ready to go home. Hoping to never look again at stars that didn’t twinkle. To go home and never return.
