by submission | Jun 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Brian McDermott
The hall was cavernous and dark. At one end, standing on a ledge, were the two high ranking Gondrian Council members. Doxenag, an elder, and young Watuu, newly appointed to his position.
Doxenag called out. “Come forward.”
A light flashed and an entrance revealed a Gondrian Commander of considerable age. His imposing physique and swagger boldly disagreed with his years. He slowly stepped forward into a circle of white light. He shimmered before the the cabinet members in his cobalt battle dress.
Doxenag hardly moved while Watuu shifted nervously. Doxenag spoke firmly.
“You are here because you have killed…”
The Commander interrupted, growling, “I know why I am here.”
Doxenag calmly continued, “Because you have extinguished the lives of thousands. You have stolen their last breaths and sent them to their beyonds.”
The Commander hissed while he quickly surveyed the hall.
Doxenag raised his voice, “For this killing, you are to be commended. You have killed well and all of Gondra will sing the praises of Commander Hikkol for generations. But as every cycle must find its end in a new beginning, so must yours. You are to be relieved of your command. The glory of the kill will no longer be yours.”
Hikkol would not hold his tongue, “If you believe I am done you are a fool.” He quickly reached into his boot and produced a pulser unit. For one moment, the only sound in the massive room was the hum and echo of the pulser’s activation sequence.
Watuu called out nervously “You cannot do this Commander! You are sworn to obey superiors!”
Hikkol growled, “I knew what you planned to ask of me. To never again revel in the glory of the kill. But reveling in that glory is what I am sworn to do, youngling. And I have two deaths left to give. Beginning with yours.”
As the Commander aimed the pulser towards Watuu, Doxenag casually waved a hand and the white light enveloping Commander Hikkol shifted to a hazy blue. As the light thickened, Commander Hikkol’s body began to fail. His legs crumbled, his arms collapsed into his torso. Within seconds he was dead.
Watuu turned to his superior in disbelief. “Gondrian Commanders are renowned for their adherence to the hierarchy. Yet he choose to ignore your orders and you knew he would!
Doxenag spoke calmly, “Gondrian Commanders are trained to kill. From the moment they are identified as younglings and assimilated into the Academy. They are awakened in death. With every kill they draw life to themselves. The kill is all. To take away the kill is to take away meaning. It is the only thing they are trained to do”
Watuu wondered out loud, “If that is so, then every Commander who is to be relieved will reject their proceeding.”
Doxenag was impressed, “Yes. Which means every Commander will directly disobey a superior. A crime punishable by death.”
“So, every Commander dies in their proceeding.” Watuu looked at the fallen Commander Hikkol, “Has any Commander ever accepted their proceeding?”
Doxenag turned to him, “Only one. He still lives. Yet continues to kill, destroying those of our own kind.”
Watuu cocked his head, “Why?”
“Because…” Doxenag’s eye caught a faint glimmer of the hazy blue light as he spoke, “…it is the only thing I am trained to do.”
by submission | Jun 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Susan Nance Carhart
The Children of the Lonely Moon charged, screaming their bloodlust. The Crimson Champions hewed them down, blades flashing, muscles bulging, armor gleaming.
Adam Firedrake banged his sword pommel on his shield, taunting a troll, while Lyra darted in, burying her daggers in giant kidneys. A sizzle of mage from Ithuriel’s staff, and the troll toppled face-forward, dead.
“Yay! We win…again!” cheered Lyra.
“Who needs healing?” Ratzak called out, lean and brown. He passed out potions, while Lyra searched the bodies for loot.
“Oh, good,” she chirped. “Another diamond.”
Another triumph for the Crimson Champions. Another key to the ancient and wicked city of Karandash, Another parade, another celebratory feast, another round of admirers at their feet. Tonight Queen Tamarys would grant Adam Firedrake her highest accolade. In her bedchamber.
They debriefed, as always, at the Tabard Inn, over predictably foaming tankards.
“So what’s next?” mused Adam “Firedrake” Schlegel. “Do we do the bandits in Wilderdeep, or the Sacred Ruby of Ispahan?”
“I’m sick of those bandits,” Ratzak sulked. “I always get hurt, and Kristi always has to rescue me.”
All dangerous curves in her black armor, Lyra Daggerhand—once Kristi Flynn—flicked bits of foam at him.
“Don’t whine,” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather be uploaded to the game and be a handsome and immortal hero, than be old, grey, and wrinkled back home in the world?”
“Or maybe dead of leukemia?” suggested Ithuriel, the blue-skinned drow. She was the smallest of them, with huge liquid eyes and delicately pointed ears.
Her fellow Champions were surprised, since Ithuriel never responded to her pre-canon name of Rachel, and ordinarily pretended there was no reality other than canon. She said nothing more, dismantling her mystery meat pie with exquisite care.
Ratzak prodded his own meat pie suspiciously. They always tasted fine—everything did—but you never knew… “I’m sick of being Ratzak the Healer! There’s nothing wrong with being David Lee.” Seeing Adam’s skepticism, he shrugged. “Handsome and… immortal David Lee.”
Adam snorted a laugh, but Ratzak/David had more to say.
“I was thinking that—well…we don’t have to follow canon at all! We can just…live. Read books. Hang out together here at the Tabard Inn.”
Shocked, Adam sputtered, “But what about the fate of all Yggdrasil?”
Kristi frowned, thinking it over. “If the world is destroyed, somebody always reloads it. Big deal.”
“Personally,” said Ithuriel, “I intend to seek out the survivors of my clan and restore it to its ancient glory.”
The edges of reality blurred and crackled. The Champions looked wildly at each other as their faces distorted and flattened. With a sudden spark, they abruptly snapped back into three dimensions, dropping their tankards in the process.
“What was that?” David demanded.
“Nothing. It was nothing,” Adam said, trying to reassure himself. “Just a temporary glitch.”
“Which, by the way, is not supposed to happen,” David shot back. “I had higher expectations of Support.”
The door burst open, and a wild-eyed woman rushed toward them.
“Champions! The Manticore of Elboracum is ravaging the valley! Only you can save us!”
The Crimson Champions stared at each other, nonplussed.
“I don’t remember that,” Kristi said slowly, “and I memorized the entire wiki before I was uploaded. How are we supposed to know what to do?”
Adam was bewildered. “A manticore? I don’t anything about manticores.”
“Oh, shit!” David slapped a hand to his brow in despair. “They’ve developed new downloadable content!”
by submission | Jun 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Josie Gowler
The fever breaks at five in the morning, suddenly. It’s like the air right after a thunderstorm. I sit up. Much too quickly. The greyish room swims for a few moments and I clutch the sides of the bed. Feet on the floor. The cold creeping up through my soles helps. I have this sensation of deja vu. The sheets are soft under my hands. There’s a nice view of a garden from the window; the sun is just starting to rise on a decent-looking day. God only knows where I am, though.
A stocky bloke in a white coat, mask and goggles comes in. He’s got a round and kindly face but he’s holding a clipboard so it must be serious. “How are you feeling?” he asks.
I can’t decide exactly what I feel like, maybe a mixture of newborn kitten and blast furnace interior. I want to tell him that, but something else is bugging me. “Were you watching me?” I ask.
“Samantha,” he says, ignoring my question. “Louise. Angela.”
I shrug. None of the names mean a thing to me. Scratching at my arm, I glance down and notice an injection hole. “What did you…” I begin.
The world spins again and the next thing is my (or Samantha’s or whoever’s) head is down the toilet. I grimace at the sour taste in my mouth, but at least my brain’s starting to clear now.
I don’t have the energy to make it back to the bedroom.
# # # # #
Midday. Damn. I clamber to my feet. I’m freezing. Fancy dozing off on the bathroom floor. Like I’ve got bugger all else to do. I swig down a glass of water and return to the bedroom. I slide into the chair next to the desk. The front page of the notepad in front of me shows a date – three days ago according to my watch – and a formula.
‘Three days. Confusion/amnesia. Whiff of paranoia’, I write. I know I just need to get some initial thoughts down at this stage before the feeling fades. I’ll refine the text later and merge it with the doc’s views. Then will come toxicology reports, proposals for a wider sample group and lastly the pre-manufacture field testing. The generals want to know what their merchandise is like. I like to think it’s part of their shoot-to-wound policy, but I suspect they just want to skip the regulatory hassle of justifying testing it on someone other than its creator. Three days seems about right to overrun an enemy stronghold. I might have hit on my next first-rater in the maximum inconvenience bio-weapons field.
I’m ravenous. Time to get that coward of a doctor back in to do the blood arrays and run the quarantine tests so I can hit the canteen. I want to catch up with my fellow lab rats: I could do with a gossip. And see whether anyone’s had a disaster this time. Well, it’s not like we’re underpaid for this crap. I smile as I push the call button. There’s probably some poor sod out there on a pittance, being injected with the last virus I made so the enemy’s virologists can test cures. It’s my job to make sure they stay one step behind of my blockbuster drugs.
So that’s it, then. Until next time.
by submission | Jun 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : K. Pittman
In the crypt, the door about to close, she dances. Her bodysuit lined with cpipe and circuits, feet bare on plascrete, steps unpracticed but confident.
She dances, gazing briefly at the helmet on the low shelf beside the windowless crèche, beside the suit’s lined tabi, beside a neatly folded stack of gray utility garments, beside her ring, beside her wife’s ring.
She hadn’t danced at their wedding. There wasn’t time or space there in that floating, golden moment in the bursar’s office. A signature, a brief, lingering kiss, a tap of the chit on the flat screen. An aircab. Lifetimes ago, before broken past.
She hadn’t danced as a child.
Mama was sick, Papa was old, and they had no friends. There were no others, no predecessors, no cousins, no siblings. “You were a gift to us,” her parents would say, at their brief meals between endless rotating shifts, lying past pain and stress and trouble, past thin walls vibrating pointless hate and sick ambition. “You were the best thing that ever happened.” She didn’t dance, but her childhood was relatively untroubled.
She kept to herself, and while a happy child, didn’t dance.
School had no dancing. The other kids danced, though; in their rooms, cam-to-cam and face-to-face, secret dance parties peeped in snips on devs over mealbreak in School’s evening shadowed breezeways, like some old movie everted.
There was no explicit rule against it, but there was no public dancing. There were uniforms and drills, tests and training, mealbreaks, lounge cycles, and a loosely enforced caste system, and compulsory viewing of mendacious school news, full of what she’d later call “mathematically attractive” student anchors unquestioningly and unwittingly lying about nothing and everything, about out- and in-school. The em-ays were about the same, in her nascent estimation, as the snitches, and cowards, and idiots, and quiet creeping killers, which were all the other kids. Not her scene.
She kept to herself, got decent marks, never thought about dancing.
The crypt door is closed now.
Streaks of gray fall across her eyes as she rocks and sways to a music alit from within her, her head, her body – patches of colligated melodies and rhythms swell and she starts as it, she grows as it – shuffles shakes shimmies shudders springs left prances right sways gently into turgid mental winds viscous in unseen swirling colors pulled aloft by time, shapes pushed into forces.
Soon a bell, the sound of a bell, will fill the crypt, followed by bitter cold and sleeping stink, and what she’s been told is a dreamless hibernation until the ship, the carriage of her crypt among millions of others, assumes a safe parking orbit over the terminus of a new world, under the disk and staring eye of a new system sun. Her wife waits for her in a hablab, watching the birth of a Spindle while stealthy probes map the planets and circling dust. The sound of a bell, and she’ll don the tabi, attach the helmet to the suit’s cowl, climb into the creche lined with quilts of acceleration gel, and sleep the sleep of sleeping sleep.
Many long tomorrows from now, she’ll dance with her brilliant love under concatenations of alien constellations, and those tomorrows are tomorrow, but that’s tomorrow.
Tonight ends soon, after a bright tone, and tonight she dances for the first time, seconds against the bell.
by submission | Jun 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Tom Moro
We are the light of life
We are the seeds of salvation
We are the light of life
We are the gateways of creation
We are the light of life
Gene slammed his head against the wall, tears streaming down his small, flushed face. Fear had been pouring through his body for so long that he was crashing into adrenaline exhaustion, shaking, fevered, barely able to move. But he was so close. They wouldn’t win, not now.
The chanting was intensifying as the asteroid neared its destination. In the sightless black, desperately feeling along the wall, the boy was permeated by the deep, dead voices. We are the light of life… The sound had been going on for weeks, so long that his lips unconsciously mouthed the words, his brain too tired to resist. He could not remember sleeping. He could barely remember anything but these endless, dark rooms.
The priests had taken his family to the temple. He could remember that, the confusion of his little sister, his mother’s straight back. They had stayed in the temple, marked as priestesses (whores/slaves) to pay for his father’s sins. The sons though (brothers he had brothers) were taken to the depths, to the rocket chambers. A man with holy hollowed eye sockets had made them kneel and showed them the rockets and told them what an honor this was for the planet, for their family.
They were walking miracles. They would go up into the sky and travel in a great blessed mountain. The mountain would be full of life, seeds and bacteria and humans (blood sacrifice), and it would fall on to a dead world. They would die, crushed and burned, and it would awaken that world for the Great Mother. They were heroes. They would go to Heaven and have ice cream and vids and sex. Miraculous.
They put the heroes in ships and then in repurposed asteroids, and locked them in and played the chanting. We are the seeds of salvation… Gene had sat against a wall for days and peed on himself. There was no food. The boys in the asteroid muttered to each other and lurched around, but slowly, the heroes all grew still. They all began to chant.
Gene liked to read. And the priests might have stuck him in the dark and filled him with chanting, but he still understood things like terraforming and conquest and theocracy and tyranny. Better yet, Gene was a mechanic’s son who liked to read. And they could take away sleep and sight and family, but they couldn’t take away that Gene damn well knew how to stop an engine.
It took him two weeks of crawling and fumbling to understand the vents, to begin to picture how the great engines shoved them through the stars. It took him three more days to find a crippled boy who had a metal walking stick. Another day waiting for that boy to die. And then four to break and break and break everything he could reach.
Two more vents. Two more vents and the engines would automatically shut down to avoid a useless, still-in-space explosion. They would be stranded in orbit until someone fetched them. They would all die, mindlessly chanting, starving. But they wouldn’t die burning on a dead world, sacrificed to spark life in the service of the Great Mother. They would be a failure.
Gene pushed himself up. Two more vents.
