by submission | Jan 30, 2010 | Story
Author : James King
The gate shimmered like a disk of melted solder. After all this time, the idea of inter-dimensional travel still amazed Alex. Wrapping his mind around the fact that, though it is a new world that is being explored, it’s the same time, same location in the galaxy, just a different dimension took some getting used to.
He stared back watching the rest of the team come through the gate, helpless to stop them. The surprised look on each of their faces as they stepped through reminded him of the first time anyone had ever attempted inter-dimensional travel.
The team was much younger back then, chuckling nervously as straws were drawn to see who would be the first through the gate. Everyone claimed they wanted to be first, but the relief was evident when a long straw was drawn. Alex got the first short straw and has been the first one through the gate ever since.
He was starting to shiver from the cold.
The amount of power required in forming the gateway forced the exploration team to travel through quickly. Safety protocols were established so that each team member was prepared for any possible contingency, whether environmental or hostile. Alex thought to himself that this was one scenario that never came up during the simulations.
He wanted to shout out in the hopes someone would hear him, but he knew that was futile as he floated further from the gate. Devoid of air the vacuum of space was deafeningly silent. Everyone dispersed like droplets from a splash of water hitting the ground, drifting away from the gate and away from each other. He finally realized that the weapon he clutched tightly to his body was useless and let it go, watching it drift away.
The environmental containment suit he wore provided oxygen and some protection from the harsh cold, but it wouldn’t last long. He wonders if they will attempt to send another team to locate them when they don’t return, understanding this to be an academic question, since they all would have long since expired from the cold or lack of oxygen before this possibility would occur.
No one ever thought, especially after all the worlds they had explored, that traveling to a dimension where the earth no longer existed was a possibility. A contingency never planned for and a lesson learned the hard way. Alex watched the gate, looking like the surface of a dark pond, getting smaller as he drifted further away. He marveled at the beauty of space. Alex had always wanted to be an astronaut. Weightlessness is even better than he imagined.
by submission | Jan 29, 2010 | Story
Author : Helstrom
“What are you doing?”
I looked up from the astrogation table and into the curious eyes of a five-year-old girl hovering in the access hatch.
“Hey, hey,” I said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
“I wanted to see out the window. Captain said it was okay.”
Of course he had. The captain was a ‘fourth generation’ spacer. Back in my time, with mining operations just beginning, spacers were recruited from the ranks of kumpels, roughnecks and sat-divers, resulting in strongly reeking ships populated by loud men with short necks and the very strong absence of curiosity that comes from living in an environment where any moving part you don’t know intimately can probably kill you. These days the profit margins were so huge they were shipping out whole families who would spend most of their life on one of the colonies – including their children.
“Okay then,” I smiled, “But just a few minutes. I’m doing important stuff.”
She flashed a grin revealing a few missing teeth and pushed herself through the hatch, deftly settling into a corner between the tracking telescope and the cupola frame. Children adapted to free-fall in next to no time at all. At the turn of a switch, the cupola blinds withdrew and space unfolded before us. She glued herself to the window for a while, but deep space isn’t much to look at and she soon took more interest in the myriad of astrogation equipment in the room.
Settling herself in the cupola, she asked: “Is that the map?”
“No, not really. I don’t use a lot of maps. This is a plot, it shows me how much time it takes until we have to make another burn, like when we left. Remember how you had to stay in bed and got real heavy? That was a burn,”
She scowled, “I know what a burn is, silly. So it tells you where we’re going?”
“Well, pretty much, yes.”
“Then it’s a map!” She giggled triumphantly.
“You’re smarter than you look with those missing teeth.”
“Don’t you have a computer for this?”
“I do – three, in fact. But computers can be wrong sometimes, and most of the knobs and dials in here let me check things for myself. If it gets really bad I can even do it on paper.”
“What if you’re wrong too?”
“Well, that depends on how far wrong I am We could crash into Venus instead of going into orbit. Or we could shoot past her, pick up a gravity boost and fly into the sun if we’re too fast for a rescue boat to catch up with us. But my job is to make sure that doesn’t happen so you get to your new home safely.”
She nodded, a serious frown on her face, “That’s very important.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said about my work in a while – I laughed and gave her a hug before pushing her back towards the hatch: “Now, go back to the ring and let me work, okay? I’ll show you more after dinner if you want. Oh, and if you see the captain, make sure you tell him how important my job is.”
by submission | Jan 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Timothy E. Bacon & Paul J. Green
Jones lowered the thermal imager from his eyes and wiped the adrenaline sweat from his face. There were still a dozen heat signatures secured down the street amidst the no man’s land of twisted girders and stone rubble. The last of the insurgents were hunkered in, fixed and fortified; it was going to be difficult to flush them out.
He slumped back against the rusted hulk of a car. The rush of the berserker pad he had inhaled earlier was wearing off and his nerve endings were jangling. He fingered the seeping bandage on his arm where he had been clipped by a bullet and a dull throbbing pain settled in at the base of his skull.
They had been dropped hot into the LZ at dawn and Jones had led a frenzied charge through the devastated city. Rebels had overrun the streets and his squad was forced to give no quarter and no mercy. They had suffered heavy casualties, mostly raw recruits fresh out of boot. Sanders had taken one in the throat and had screamed silent and wet. Taylor had lost half his head and had stumbled around like a zombie before dropping. All of them had been noble sacrifices in an effort to liberate a dead city.
Manhattan had been swallowed by a firestorm many years ago. A misguided revolt had left three million souls kissed by flame and fusion in its wake. Buildings had been refashioned and reborn by a madman’s touch; their metal and glass skins flayed open and exposed. Lady Liberty still stood at the mouth of the Hudson, scorched black and pockmarked with shells. Her torch raised high in defiance against the surrounding destruction.
Jones felt tense and cobra-coiled. An anxious silence hung over the street broken only by sporadic gunfire and the sharp squeal of radio chatter. There were no options left. A frontal assault on the remaining rebels was reckless. He would have to call in an air-strike. He punched in the co-ordinates and thumbed his squawk pad. “Bring down the thunder.”
The Valkyries blasted low through the concrete canyons, their triple rotors thrumming whisper quiet, their sleek, dark shapes swooping in and out of the derelict towers.
Jones watched the ships streak past. “Heads up, there’s birds in the canyon.”
The Valkyries chopped in heavy over the target, kicking up clouds of debris, and raining down a barrage of scatter bombs. The world flared white as a dozen small suns dawned on the street smashing and scattering the rebels. The lucky ones were vaporized instantly. The stragglers, screaming and clutching at their burnt flesh and ruined eyes, were left to the wrath of the snipers who dropped them one after another from their perches high above the devastation.
Jones gave the signal to stand down. There was nothing left to do now but a quick sweep to tag and bag the bodies. He started to clamber over the debris. Someone cleared their throat behind him.
He turned to see Corporal Martin tapping his watch.
“Hey Jones, it’s quitting time!”
Jones looked back at his squad. They were a motley group; beaten, bloodied, and tired. They wanted nothing more than to head home, kiss their wives, hold their babies, and knock back a few pints at the local bar. Jones allowed himself a tight smile. They’d earned their pay today. These men of the 83rd Reclamation Division were some of the best he’d ever served with; the very elite that the New York City Sanitation Department had to offer. He was proud of them. They were true garbage men.
“You guys go ahead. I’m going to put in some overtime.”
by submission | Jan 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
Dr. Menkal gently removed Miller’s bandages. When the last strip peeled away from his eyes, he looked around, not fixating on anything. His irises were blue and cloudy with cataracts, the whites shot through with red. The bandage had pulled away a lot of the burned skin around his eyelids. He looked like something out of a horror movie.
“I can’t see,” he said. Menkal crossed her arms and frowned.
“No,” said Menkal. Miller looked at the floor. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“You a shrink?”
“Yes.” Miller blinked.
“What’s to talk about?”
“You stood in the science room with the sun filter at seventy-five percent and blinded yourself. I’ve gotta assume you had a reason.” Miller pursed his lips. They were cracked and scabby. It was only thanks to several kilos of nanoparticle-enhanced burn cream that he still had any skin on his face.
“Don’t you ever want to see it?”
“What? The sun?”
“Yeah. You know, at full power.” Menkal sat down across from Miller and crossed her legs.
“Sure. But I know that if I do that, I’ll go blind.” Miller smiled. New cracks formed in his lips and started to bleed, and he winced.
“It was worth it.”
“What did you see?”
“It was like the face of God.”
“But what did you *see*?”
“The face of God. The face of the Sun.”
“Your retinas are gone and your corneas are cooked. You’ll never see again. Was it really worth it?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the visions.” Miller frowned.
“No. Every time I tell a doctor about them, they say the visions are because of the epilepsy.”
“What are the visions like?” Miller was silent for a little while, blinking at the floor.
“A bit like what it was like to see the Sun up close: like seeing the face of God. But the Sun was a million times more intense.” He licked his lips. “You think I’m delusional.”
“You might be. But I’ve never seen the face of God, or the face of the Sun, so I won’t judge just yet.”
“Stop being friendly. You’re building rapport so I’ll take whatever damn drugs you give me.”
“No I’m not.” Miller fell silent again.
“She talks to me.”
“Who?”
“The Sun.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know yet. I still can’t understand Her. Her communication’s too powerful, that’s why the visions she sends me look like seizures. She’s trying to contact me. She’s *alive*.” He paused. “*Now* you think I’m delusional.”
“Not yet.” Miller binked.
“I don’t know how She’s alive, but She is. Maybe She’s been colonized by some alien nanotechnology or something. Maybe an invisible Dyson Swarm or something. I don’t know. But she’s trying to contact me.”
“Okay. But why did you look?”
“I wanted to see.”
“See Her?”
“Yes.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.”
“What can you see now?”
“Everything.”
Miller stood up and fixed his cloudy eyes on the doctor’s. He met her gaze, and she had no doubt that he really could see everything.
Outside, the sun glinted brightly off the station’s hull.
by submission | Jan 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
Memory swap was the addictive drug of the 23rd Century.
Swap was rather a misnomer; one had to be dead in order to be relieved of the memories locked inside the brain. No known process had been developed to remove the memories from a living person without killing them. Derelict users had become prone to kidnapping and killing many innocents. Each species seemed to be targeted evenly.
It was a predicament the United Galaxies had grappled with for the last twenty years, finally assigning me the jurisdictional task of regulating and punishing all offenders. No simple matter considering there were over two hundred and sixty habitable planets under my thumb.
The other predicament, one the UG hadn’t considered nor tested for, since I was widely held as the moral standard for all things lawful in my quadrant. I was one of the worst addicts in the galaxy.
Naturally, I got to see the list of ‘drugs’ before every raid. I got to say what got kept and what got destroyed.
My sanguine approach to the job allowed me to selectively indulge in my addiction. I usually kept the very best minds for myself; never anything vulgar or morally reprehensible. Not all users were able to control themselves like I could.
Suffice it to say, it was an explosive rush when the memories — the fantasies, the sexual conquests, the emotions, the secrets — poured into your own memory once you hooked in, but like all drugs, faded to something akin to a dream once you came off the high. Being an addict normally destroyed the user since they tended to go for the worst sort of retrievals: serial killers, rapists, warmongers.
I realized right away that I could contain only a small part of the trade, but certainly the deadliest.
I was able to immediately make a large impact on the criminal trade. Criminals were no longer allowed to live. Once a creature entered the galaxy penal system, they were put to death and cremated. Period.
Yes, yes. I’ve heard it before. A few innocents inevitably got swept up in the net.
Within a few years, my decision was widely hailed since it also cut back on the expense of housing galaxian riff-raff.
Once the worst of the trade was under control, I went for the scientific technology, developed by the Betelgeusens. The extractions were expensive and precise. The spine, stem cells and brain had to be kept in an incubator until usage, but users could plug in as many times as they wanted. Since my assignment began, the technology had gotten better. Faster. Cheaper. My team went after processing and storage centers. The memories couldn’t be stored electronically.
We’d gotten word of a huge shipment of illegal criminal minds being transferred to Alfa Centauri’s Black Moon. We were there to intercept the cargo ship.
Inside, we found ten optimum-grade platinum memory containers. When I saw the names on the outside of the container, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Someone had paid big bucks for the memory drugs inside and I wanted them.
It wasn’t my usual philosophical fare. It was an addict’s dream.
I hesitate to tell you whose memories they were for fear you’ll think I’m exaggerating. But I wanted to try them. Ang Pheron, the most celebrated whore of our generation. General Zod Doranda, leader of the Orion uprising and Patto Synestol, the famed mass-murderer. I frowned at the last name. He was supposed to be dead and cremated. Some employees weren’t to be trusted.
I sighed.
Just this once.
