by submission | Sep 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
The crowd is fast on the heels of the gate guards. Evacuation sirens are blaring, deafening. Over everything the massive ship looms, engines warming up. Everybody is running, but from what, or why, nobody can say. They’ve been trained to for years. That’s all they know.
In front of them a guard turns and fires a single round.
A man looks down at his gut. He’s been shot, he realizes. He could live with enough time and the right care, but there is no time and right now nobody cares.
‘Daddy,’ the little girl says, ‘you’re bleeding.’
‘I know.’ He looks at the young guard, still holding the pistol in shaking hands, unsure of what he has done. On either side the crowd surges forward. There are two more gunshots, a shout. It’s over quickly.
The man picks his little girl from between the legs of the adults, trying not to scream from the effort and the pain. ‘Come on, honey,’ he tells her. ‘Close your eyes.’
The people surge over the body of the guard and the man who killed him, trampling their bones and blood and flesh back into the dust.
The man staggers forward, every step measured in blood and shortness of breath.
Around him the people scream and scream and scream. They’re about to be left behind and they know it. Everybody is climbing over one another in a bid to get forward even a little bit. Many are crushed beneath dirty feet. They leave the man alone, however. He is large, a steel worker covered in scars and plates, augmented and able to easily crush any one of them.
But he’s dying. He looks down again. His pants and shirt are soaked in blood, more blood than it should be possible to lose. He looks forward, looks up. The boarding ramp is only fifty feet away, cordoned off by strong men with large guns, fighting for their lives against the mob. The soldiers begin backing up. Time has run out.
So the man moves. One arm holds his child while the other pushes bodies away. To him they’re nothing. He moves onward, inexorable.
He’s forty feet away.
Thirty.
The crowd begins to run: Ignition is coming. One of the soldiers notices him, raises his gun, fires.
Twenty.
Ten.
His chest burns, the body he is shielding his daughter with is sputtering blood, bone, and oil. The ramp begins to rise.
The man collapses half on it, his little Sarah spilling from his arms onto the metal. Everybody is gone away now, and the soldiers are simply watching.
‘Daddy,’ she is crying. ‘Daddy. Get up. Please. You have to get up. Please get up.’
The soldiers look anywhere but before them.
‘Love,’ he whispers. He needs to say more, but his time is up. One broken hand gives Sarah’s arm a squeeze. Then the ramp has risen too far and his legs are too weak. He falls to the ground like a bag of cement mix.
Sarah is looking over the edge now, down at him. ‘Daddy,’ she screams. ‘Daddy. Get up!’ She is about to jump down to help him when rough, calloused hands grab her and pull her back.
The soldier holds her to his chest while she cries, one gentle hand on her head. He says nothing. As the ramp seals he squeezes her tight, but he may as well be a ghost to her.
Little Sarah turned six today. The dress her daddy got her is dirty and torn.
A roar – the ship begins to rise.
Everybody is leaving something behind.
by submission | Sep 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
We’re cutting it damn close. The three Gyth gliders are closing quickly as we jink in and out of the towering rock spires attempting to stay out of their line of fire. We’re gaining altitude quickly enough, but Kharla’s running low on water to convert to hydrogen for lift. She isn’t used to this pace. If we don’t make it to the event horizon we were done for.
I turn to my helmsman. “How’s she doing?”
K’li’ilk swivels two eye stalks toward me while the other two keep close watch on the jagged wall of rock, foliage and jutting stone terraces flashing past our portside. He answers rapidly in his clicking insectoid language. He’s morbidly pessimistic, as usual.
“I was afraid you’d say that”, I reply. “Just keep her going up.”
Another barrage of angry clicks.
“I don’t know! Tell her she can have all the water and sunshine she wants when she gets us to the other side.”
K’li’ilk scowls with his eyes, then closes them all as he concentrates on making empathic contact with Kharla, our ship.
Kharla’s a Palori, a pseudo-sentient plant. She uses photosynthesis to convert water into hydrogen for mobility through the vast airspace of this uncanny, improbable hollow planet. The H2 is stored in the one-hundred-forty thousand cubic foot, translucent gas membrane looming eighty feet above our gondola. Below the two crew decks, her four enormous, leathery leaves are currently making critical course changes, acting like rudders and/or sails when necessary. Dangling forty feet lower, her water sac and other organs are contained within a smaller, thicker, venous membrane. Trailing nearly a thousand feet, her many hollow, prehensile roots whip about in the gusting winds. She is a thing of beauty.
Jarku, my centipaur engineer, scuttles over on eighty spindly legs. “Ballistas are loaded. CO2, H2, O2 tanks fully charged, sir.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need them.”
We clear the highest spire and make a mad dash for the Event Horizon, a spectacular band thirty miles thick of low to nil gravity which divides the upper and lower hemispheres. Vague, amorphous shapes float within, likely large water bubbles filled with the strange algae that grows up here. If we’re lucky, that’s all they are.
Kharla’s gas membrane has become significantly smaller. We’re losing momentum fast and air pressure has decreased significantly, further slowing our assent.
The leather winged Gyth open fire, raining stone bullets across the hull, tearing chunks out of my ship. The twins, Torrah and Neb return fire with CO2 ballistas, but the fast moving, acrobatic Gyth are difficult to hit.
“Three thousand feet to EH.” Jarku reports. Too damned far.
K’li’ilk informs me that Kharla is nearly out of water.
Time for evasive action. My girl needs help.
“Jarku, fire up the thrusters. K’li’ilk, let Kharla know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Click, click.”
Kharla’s gas membrane begins deflating, shriveling into a tight, organic ball above us. My stomach lurches as our upward momentum ceases and we begin to plummet.
One Gyth gets too close. Kharla lashes out with her roots snaring the bird-beast in their sinewy grip. She rips off a wing then drops the howling Gyth tumbling to the ocean one hundred miles below. One down.
“Jarku. Now! Make it count.”
Another Gyth swoops up from below as Jarku ignites the short-range pulse-jets mounted below the gondola, catching the avian in its searing blue flame and rocketing us straight up. The remaining Gyth retreats.
We’re going to make it, but our troubles aren’t over yet. We still have to cross the Event Horizon. I hope our cargo is worth it.
by submission | Sep 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
There are three types of people who become FTL-pilots: crazies, masochists and sad sacks.
I’m the last.
At least, that’s what my boss would tell you. That I’m one of those sad bastards who can’t let go of the past. Then he’d probably tell you what a fine pilot I am because he doesn’t want to risk alienating a good FTL-pilot.
Today’s run is just a short hop, from New Mars to the colony on Weaver’s World. The cargo bay is jammed with stasis pods, loaded with replacement workers. It’ll take sixteen hours to get to Weaver’s World. That’s just long enough for a nice chat.
As soon as I’ve got clearance from traffic control, I flip the switch. All the hairs on the back of my hands stand on end as we transition to FTL-space.
Three hours into the flight, Grandma Peg appears. She doesn’t look like I remember her at the end, careworn and sick. This is grandma as a young woman, in her twenties, wearing her engineer’s coveralls, ready to kick ass and take names.
“Hello, Charlie,” she says, taking the copilot’s seat.
“Hello, Grandma. How are you?”
“Still dead. And yourself?”
“Still not dead,” I say, cheerfully.
She laughs and we settle into comfortable silence. After a little while, some of the others show up. My dad, who died in the Newt War, and my sister, Caroline, who bled out in the delivery room because of a faulty auto-doc.
They’re hungry for news of the living. Especially Caroline. She wants to know all about the daughter she died giving birth to.
“She’s thinking of becoming a pilot.”
My dead sister’s face lights up. “Really?”
“If she does, she won’t stay,” I warn. “She doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
Dad laughs. “Another rationalist. If I only knew then, what I know now.”
Lots of people don’t believe you can interact with the dead in FTL-space. This, despite the evidence to the contrary. Most of the doubters think ‘the dead’ are just some type of FTL-space life-form with telepathic abilities. None of the doubters have been able to explain why aliens would appear as our dead and I don’t believe it anyway.
At the halfway mark to Weaver’s World, Allison arrives. My wife looks as lovely as ever. The rest of the family fades away, to give us our privacy.
We talk. I tell her about my life and she tells me about her existence. You can’t touch the dead, so we can’t dance. Not properly. I still cue up the music and we shadow dance with each other, swaying back and forth.
At the deceleration point, a chime rings. I turn to the controls, but Allison calls my name and, smiling, takes my hand. Her fingers are warm and solid.
“Oh God,” I say. “When did it happen?”
“A few minutes ago,” she says.
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
I decide it doesn’t. My dead wife takes my hand and we dance into eternity.
by submission | Sep 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sean A. Murphy
“I would first like to thank you all for your time and consideration, but I have to open this session with an apology.
I do not have any easy solutions to offer you, nor even any that may ask you all for some tremendous investment. I know many of you expected and were fully prepared to put the considerable resources of your peoples to work. In fact I expect that if I asked this gathering, expenditure greater than the full sum of all prior human accomplishment could be attained. Unfortunately a proposal is not what I come to you with. Rather what I have is a prospect, an idea which I feel it is now our duty to explore.
Human history is riddled with tales of beings of intelligence beyond the familiar. From the titans and gods of old to the Hollywood movies and popular culture of today, our collective culture is fraught with tales of life beyond our own. These ideas may have a myriad of inspirations and most if not all are undoubtedly mere imaginings, but the current of belief since the dawn of man has maintained that, however distant, we are not alone in the universe. I ask you now, esteemed representatives, if you are prepared, if we are prepared, to be right.
I have found a structure in the silence of the stars. My experiments and the issue of the day have led me to look into space as no other has before me and I tell you I have found something. The data is here. It has been poured over and confirmed by the greatest minds of our generation. It is indisputable. The conclusions I draw from it may offend you but this is not something we can afford to ignore.
This design presented now behind me, gentlemen, is a system of interconnected and communicating nodes, as I have so far mapped them out. As yet I cannot offer you a translation of what they say but I assure you all the foremost data and linguistics analysts have showed beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are both nonrandom, and not naturally occurring. Not only that, but in my detecting of them they have also detected me. Even as we speak several of these nodes have turned, from as best I can tell, a listening ear to our lonely planet.
I can understand your outrage gentlemen but I assure you I have not taken any unilateral action on this planets behalf, they became aware of me the moment I began my experiments, as you yourselves obliged me to. I realize these are not the results you were hoping for, but this may be our only option, indeed our only salvation.
Said as plainly as possible I put this statement before the General Assembly. There is nothing we can do about our sun; we simply do not have the technology. But they might.”
-Excerpt from Dr. Wilkos Bradshaw’s address to The General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20th 2047
by submission | Sep 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
Ensign Morecock felt ashamed when he returned from shore leave, but only moderately so. He knew his actions could quite possibly get him discharged from Space Fleet, but it was well worth it.
Since first contact with the Sybaris, progress toward mutually beneficial intergalactic commerce and trade were exceeding even the most conservative estimates. Morecock’s ship, the USV Horizon had been selected for the first human delegation ever to visit an alien planet. A Sybaris delegation was likewise bound for Earth.
Six months later, Horizon’s arrival at Sibaria was greeted with much fanfare by their magnanimous hosts.
The Sybaris were a semi-aquatic, technologically advanced race of ancient space explorers. Those who had first-hand experience with them often commented on their flirtatious nature (by human standards), but so much was still misunderstood about their culture and physiology. It was clear, however, that they were a passionate species, being very casual about public displays of affection, even towards humans. Sybaris ambassadors claimed that they had abolished war over five thousand years earlier and had devoted their resources exclusively to two things; space exploration and pleasure seeking. Earth, with its massive oceans, was a tantalizing tropical paradise to them and they were most keen to make contact with the local inhabitants.
Morecock slunk into his quarters and breathed a guilty sigh of relief. He felt certain no one had spotted him slip into one of the many pleasure houses on Sibaria. Everyone was so preoccupied with the breathtaking, exotic architectures and landscapes of the planet that it was easy to steal away for an hour and claim he simply got lost in the labyrinthine canal system of the capital city.
As the USV Horizon sped back home to share the news and bounty of its historic cultural union, Morecock lay on his bunk and fantasized about his own illicit cultural exchange. He was ridiculously proud to have been the first human to copulate with an alien and fell asleep to erotic memories of hedonistic tentacles, prehensile orifices and copious amounts of saline fluid.
In the morning, it hurt when he peed.
In the afternoon, it hurt when he breathed.
By evening, it hurt to move and his tongue had swollen to the size of a large egg.
The ship’s doctor took blood samples, gave Morecock a shot for the pain and held him in strict quarantine. Extensive steps had been taken by both races to rule out any possible exchange of harmful pathogens, but the doctor wasn’t willing to take any chances.
For twelve weeks Morecock lay on top of his sheets, pale and wan, sweating copiously. On week thirteen he watched helplessly as his skin began a slow, agonizing boil, like thick porridge. Fat bubbles swelled all over his body, and then deflated with a release of crimson hued steam and an audible “fthh” sound. For another week, puce ooze seeped from the resulting holes. Morecock had long become delirious and was kept sedated with a powerful soporific.
Forty-two weeks later the doctor led Captain Krup into the observation room adjacent to Morecock’s cell. The two men stared in horror.
“How many have been affected?” the captain asked, obviously shaken.
“Sixty-nine, sir. Male and female.”
“How?”
“We believe it was via some form of sexual contact.”
Behind the tinted glass, what was left of Morecock’s body had become a cradle for a squirming infant Sybaris. Wanton, sensuous tentacles probed Morecock’s gooey remains for sustenance as the tiny cephalopod cooed gleefully.
Back on Earth, the awaiting human population eagerly welcomed the Sybaris delegation with open arms.
