by submission | Jun 13, 2008 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala
The orbiter hung inverted over the blue and white sphere of Earth. Three suited figures darted around her, checking for damage from the launch.
“How’s it looking Alexi,” came a disembodied voice over the suits com-link.
“There are a few small chips in the bay door, but nothing to worry about. I’ll take some photos and send them dirt side for the groundhogs opinions. Shouldn’t cause…what the hell?” As Major Alexander Pichushkin spoke, an inch wide crater appeared in the surface of the shuttle bay door.
“Hey guys, get over here now, we have a serious problem.” as he spoke, a second and third hole appeared. “Meteoroids… take cover in the bay…Move”
The men scrambled for the safety of the ships cargo bay. Commander Swarovsky’s voice boomed in their helmets. “What the hell’s going on out there? Report.”
“Sir, I observed what appeared to be three micro-meteor strikes in the starboard bay door. We have taken cover within the bay.” Pichushkin replied.
“Get back in here now. We’ll let this blow over, and continue our damage assessment…” The commanders’ words were cut of as the entire cabin section of the orbiter was neatly, almost surgically shorn off and sent plummeting to the Indian Ocean below. The men stared in stunned silence as they looked forward. Where once the hatch to the interior of the ship, not to mention four crewmates, had been, there was now only empty space and the gentle curve of the Earth.
“There goes our ride home comrades. Ever wanted to be a moon before?” Alexi inquired derisively.
“What are we going to do?” Piotr Wrezsien asked. He was the youngest of the crew, only twenty five, with a young wife and newborn boy waiting his return at Baikanour.
“I imagine we shall die, Comrade,” Anton Tsilokovsky answered calmly, always the stoic.
“Can’t we make it to the Katerina?” Piotr asked, the desperation evident in his voice.
“She’s too far away. We would never be able to match orbits with her. There isn’t enough propellant left in our suits to maneuver,” Alexi Answered.
“Can’t we contact them. They could rescue us.” Piotr’s voice was cracking.
“Calm yourself, young malchick,” Anton replied in a soothing voice. “Katerina isn’t a ship, she can’t maneuver to save us. Relax and enjoy the view.”
“It is beautiful,” said Alexi. “Pity I shall never see the green hills of Texas again.”
“They could rescue us in a re-entry vehicle. Couldn’t they?” Piotr’s voice was shrill. “That’s it, we’ll call them and have them send an REV. They can save us.”
“No Piotr. The REV cannot move like a true ship. You know that. Its thrusters are designed to check its attitude and slow descent on re-entry. It is not capable of the complex maneuvers to rescue those as unfortunate as us. Our destiny is God’s hands.” answered Tsilokovsky, always the unruffled realist. “Well, Comrades; it was always my dream to set sail for the stars. Das vidanya moiee druggies.”
Tsilokovsky rotated one hundred eighty degrees, and kept his finger on the thrusters until the fuel was completely expended.
With a sigh, Alexi silently turned his suit, and headed back for home. The last sounds he heard over the radio were Piotr’s tearful pleas not to leave him.
Outside of Winona Texas, a young boy and his mother gazed up at the night sky.
“Look moya matb, a shooting star.”
“Yes Greggori, that is very lucky. Make a wish son, make a wish.”
by submission | Jun 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip English
Deep in the centre of the replanted and repopulated Amazon jungle, it was nearing midnight. Chieftan Sral Kunk was completing the final adjustments to his tribal attire, making sure that each bloody line he had painted on his body was curved just so, lest he face the wrath of the monkey God, Jabarr. The bones of his victims bounced against each other in a wave of clicks that rushed forth whenever he adjusted a leg, or waved his arms at a servant. He was a fearsome sight, made even more fearsome by the realisation that each bone that adorned him was a result of his impressive history of violence.
An attendant informed him that the time of the great sacrifice was at hand, so the chieftan made to walk out of his hut; shrunken skull bones clack-clacked around his neck, a cape of skin behind him, towed to the ground by hardened eyeballs. Before he did so, he ushered his servants out with a lazy command, and with a quick check out his woven-hair doorflap to make sure no-one was peeking, he ducked behind his throne of vertebrae. For a few minutes, a variety of strange beeping noises issued from where he squatted before, apparently satisfied, he clapped his hands together, stood up, and strode out to face his subjects. With a grand speech of the strength and viciousness of their tribe, he issued the command to his witch doctor to begin the ceremony.
Fires were lit, and a great cacophony rose from the tribe as they danced and prrayed in their violent, exhuberant way. Punch-ups were common during prayer, encouraged in fact, and spontaneous, energetic sex was carried out on the sweat-soaked mud, even as the flames licked the canopy far above. Finally, when all the whooping and hollering and grunting and yelling and screaming grew to its thunderous crescendo, the chieftan stood up, shook his femur mace above his head and cried out to the heavens the ancient words that had been passed onto him by his ancestors, and their ancestors before them.
The onboard voice-recognition software on the computer of the cloning chamber activated, and sent the message that another unit was required. Amongst the fire and blood, the front of the plastisteel casket steamed open, and a perfect, pale man emerged naked and frightened, searching around him for friends he had lost centuries earlier. The witch doctor’s spear was sharp; death, quick. Chieftan Sral Kunk sighed and leaned his head on his hands. It just isn’t the same these days, he thought.
by submission | Jun 11, 2008 | Story
Author : Andrew Segal
Brachyuran Shifter ships poured themselves though the Dreen wormhole; in seconds they would deliquesce to reform light years away. Then the skies above the bulbous undulating Freddyan busker hive would darken and collapse into a million blood red shards…
That was further than Carl thought he would reach tonight, he scratched his head. Eric’s email, in its insulting tone, had really annoyed him. Yes, Eric had been correct, he had been running out of ideas for describing inter-galactic space travel, craft stuttered, jumped, Flittered, FTL’d, gated, stardrived, vortexed, hyperspaced, particle crunched, teleported, warped, weaved, sieved, impulsed, bussarded, ramjeted and otherwise flung themselves across the universe. So what? So it sounded better than silver spaceships being fired across the galaxy, but he liked the silver spaceships, redolent of the rocket powered optimism of the fifties. He felt sick of the constraints of the logged on internet junkie tech savvy reader who bemoaned the very existence of gleaming rocket ships, of robots wired together with valves and transistors, of a.i.’s that burned out analysing jokes. Rocket ships should just land on alien worlds; Cosmonauts should fight it out amongst hordes of multi-armed barbaric mono-cultured insect men without the requirement of quantum mechanics or oxygen masks or thinly disguised contemporary political machinations.
Carl lazily dragged the ringing phone from its plastic nest,
“Hello”
“Swim!”
The phone rocked back in the cradle.
No star ship in a Carl Acumen novel was going to swim the cosmic ether, (one had once in ‘Water Planet; Wet Express’, but well, it was for kids), whatever Eric thought. Eric was a fossil; literally, a desiccated zombie of a man, according to the doodle Carl had sketched on the pad beside the phone, during the previous evening’s interminably long and wildly unnecessary discussion into the propulsion systems of non-existent plot devices. Carl had argued that all real star travel would have consequences; opening wormholes would be ridiculously dangerous, Eric just wanted a new word.
If Eric wanted his star ships to swim, he could correct the proofs himself. He never would, Elaine would, just as she always corrected Eric’s editorial flights of fancy before they reached the printers. Carl knew he was safe, he returned to the final chapter of ‘Dreen war; Plasma Suns’. The real sun projected an intense white moving line of early morning light across the desk, as he continued typing out to the beat of a high octane track crackling out of tinny computer speakers. The climatic ending, set high above the immense Freddyan busker hive, turned out fine, for the heroes. Admittedly, Carl had been saddened by the destruction of the millennia old hive, an ancient cultural artefact destroyed for story expediency, but the readers never gave a damn about it so why should he. The book was finished. Carl managed to save it just before the electrics went off. Just another East coast brown out.
He headed to the kitchen, past the small grouping of family photos, some faded by the bright sunlight. He ignored them; a habit which had began to form after Isabelle’s last phone conversation. He turned his head away, as he passed them.
This book would keep him above water for a little while if the car avoided its rust coronary.
He grinned and looked out of the kitchen window, across the bay.
There was another sun in the sky, smaller, but becoming increasingly brighter, growing in intensity and expanding across the horizon.
Standing in the kitchen, He watched the immense wave of light approaching.
Carl wished he could swim.
by submission | Jun 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Chris McCormick
Crouching slightly, she trod softly towards the small brick hut. Her cloud poured through the door ahead of her, flooding the small room, and through it she felt into each corner. She brushed over each surface, carefully checking for anomalies. There were frames hanging on the walls, a small crack in one corner of the hut, a table, some chairs. She was impatient, so by now she had almost walked in through the entrance of the hut. With her cloud she felt over the items on the table as she did so. There was a small alarm clock, some paper, pens, pencils, a stone ovoid that she thought must be a paperweight. She felt-sensed down the sides of the table, into the drawers that she could now see from the entrance. She began to explore the contents of the drawers. Wait a minute. What is that? The paperweight had a slightly warmer energy signature than it should have. Maybe someone had held it recently. Or maybe –
FUCK.
She released Swift into her system and everything seemed to slow as she physically propelled her own body backwards out of the hut. The stone ovoid exploded outwards now into a cloud which intermingled with her cloud. The attrition rate in her cloud was huge in the volume where the two clouds overlapped. She sucked what remained of her cloud backwards as fast as it would come towards the entrance to the hut. She was by now almost all of the way out of the door, seeming to hang in mid air; physics excruciatingly slow under the influence of the drug.
Before all of her cloud was out she had it pull matter from the door frame and roof, whatever it could touch, and fill the entrance with a diamond-hard membrane that was easier to construct than it was to break apart. The last gasps of the remenants of her cloud that were still trapped behind the membrane told her that she had momentarily trapped the mech cloud, before the signal from those nodes winked out entirely.
By now her body was striking the dirt outside the hut as it came to rest. She could see out of the corner of her peripheral vision small dust rolls balooning out from under the parts of her body that had already touched the ground. She remembered the crack in the corner of the hut. This was no good. By now the mech cloud would have found the crack; the path of least resistance. It would be rounding the side of the hut to rip her apart in a few milliseconds. She thought hard.
This was crazy. This was a big risk, but if she didn’t take this chance she was fucked anyway. She recalled a program she had written way back, in a fit of teenage angst. Cheesy algorithmic poetry. She pulled it into her conciousness, modified it, and then pushed it out into her cloud. The cloud obeyed, turning on her just as the mech cloud rounded the side of the hut. Her cloud set upon her and began tearing off her atoms, molecules, cells one by one and converting them into dust. She lost conciousness. She was dust. Stupid, stupid dust.
The mech cloud pulled up short, probing and hesitated. There was nothing here but dust, and it didn’t care about dust. The mech cloud floated cautiously on the breeze and with an almost shrug like movement, flowed away.
Minutes later she came to, reassembled, lying in the dirt. Ha. Goddamn it. She smiled.
by submission | Jun 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Brian Armitage
Murray grunted, straining against the bars of the cage, willing his arm to stretch further. Finally, his fingers closed on his prize. He plucked the knight from the board and dropped it carefully into place, one move away from Hjdarrrr’s bishop.
Hjdarrrr’s single eyestalk elongated, the pink photosensory bulb blinking at the white knight. “Oooom,” the alien said, its entire furry body vibrating as it spoke, “very good move.”
Murray grunted again, this time in disgust. “About time I made one.” His cage rocked slightly as he settled against one side. He was suspended above the chessboard, the steel cage mounted to an overhead track for easy storage.
Every hair on the rabbit-sized creature turned light blue, indicating sympathy. “Do not beat yourself up, Murray. You are the best chass player I have ever played chass with.”
“It’s chess, Dar. And I just taught you to play yesterday. I’m the only person you’ve ever played chess with.”
The alien’s color shifted to a hue Murray didn’t recognize, and its eyestalk straightened, pointed at him. “…my statement is true.” Then, it turned back to the chessboard. The black queen shimmered and lifted from the board. A point above Hjdarrrr’s eyestalk was glowing. The queen drifted across the board and landed, covering the white knight from a distance and effectively cutting off its offensive. With a shift to red-orange – self-confidence, or perhaps pride – Hdjarrrr nodded its eye at Murray. “You may go.”
Murray grumbled. “I can’t believe we lost the war to you.”
Hjdarrrr’s color remained the same. “We are smaller beings, but our tactics were superior.”
“Yeah, tactics.” Murray glared at the chessboard from above. “Doesn’t hurt that you’re all telekinetic.”
“Your statement is true.” The alien stared up at the human, awaiting his next move, but Murray sat motionless. “Do not be bitter, Murray. Someday, perhaps your race will develop mind skills of its own.” A tinge of patronizing yellow.
“Maybe.” Then, Murray pointed, eyes narrowed.
The white knight shimmered, scooted across the board, and tipped over Hjdarrrr’s bishop.
The color drained from Hjdarrrr’s body. The eyestalk froze, focused on the white knight. Slowly, after a long time, it rotated up to face Murray.
“Oh, doop.”
Murray pointed at the alien, gathering his focus. “You said it.”
