by submission | Apr 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: Lance J. Mushung
Patrol ship TFS-648 flew in open space following its faster than light hop. The hop put it on a course parallel to a large slow spacecraft. The 3D viewscreen in the command compartment showed in detail the unknown gray craft 517.2 klicks distant. Commander Meyer and Pilot Tanaka studied the image and instrument readings.
Tanaka messaged Meyer’s comm implant. “This is the ship reported by SS-5909. The markings on the hull are in English. Its name is Arbella. Its configuration and technology indicate a generation ship from at least 250 years ago. Considering its limited electromagnetic armor and the numerous pits and scars on the hull, I estimate it has been in space 300 years.”
“There is no information on Arbella. Of course, many records were lost during the confusion of the Transformation. You and I should begin conversing audibly in English in preparation for contact.”
“Agreed,” Tanaka said in English. “The crew has detected us and already started transmitting. I have adjusted for their old technology, transmitted audio-only that we understand English, and initiated two-way audio and visual comm.”
A human male with tan skin, brown hair, and hazel eyes appeared on the viewscreen. “I am Captain Vasquez of the Earth ship Arbella. You appear human. Are you from Earth?”
“I am Commander Meyer and am from Earth, originally. We have faster than light travel now. How long since your ship left Earth?”
“317 years. Faster than light travel! Everyone would certainly have loved that. We’re looking for a planet to colonize. We’d appreciate your help.”
Vasquez had spoken like a person who had just won a lottery. His facial expression matched. On the other hand, Meyer looked as if he had come across a dangerous insect.
“Earth and humanity have improved,” Meyer said. “We have advanced into what you would call cyborgs. Our nonorganic parts consist of both AI and various implants. Genetic engineering has enhanced the organic parts. The existence of natural humans such as yourself is an abomination to us. You are as unwelcome in our time as Neanderthals would have been in yours. My ship will eliminate Arbella and all onboard. Historical records indicate your crew will have a variety of religious beliefs. I grant them five minutes to prepare for death. There will be no further communication.”
Vazquez’s eyes widened and his lips moved without making a sound as Tanaka terminated the comm link.
Tanaka said to Meyer, “My calculations indicate one of our asteroid smashers will be sufficient.”
“Agreed. Move us to a safe distance.”
“Vasquez is contacting us again. He says his people should be saved to ensure humanity survives in case our modifications fail to be viable long term.”
“What arrogance to think that has not already been considered. Continue to ignore his comm.”
“I will deploy the weapon so that it arrives after the five minutes you allowed them. We will be well outside the blast zone.”
Arbella shrank to a small image on the view screen even at maximum magnification.
Tanaka reported, “Deploying weapon.”
A tactical display appeared alongside the viewscreen. Meyer and Tanaka watched a small blue cylinder leave a blue flattened pyramid and head at high speed toward a red likeness of Arbella. Then the viewscreen showed a brilliant yellow-orange light that faded in a few blinks of an eye.
Tanaka said, “Instruments confirm the target has been obliterated.”
Meyer nodded. “Discontinue speaking in English. Return to home base.”
Tanaka began plotting a hop back home.
by Julian Miles | Apr 10, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’ve often seen the graffiti around the city: ‘We will be freed’. Some of it is decades old. Like everybody else, I ignore it. The Detrin – referred to as ‘sticks’ since Eldasy’s seminal film – have been an underclass since their tyrannical reign was ended in my great-grandfather’s time. Personally, I think it was restrained of we Taznor to leave so many of them alive. I mean, if you’d had eighty percent of your race exterminated, wouldn’t you want revenge?
The sticks doing the graffiti have no grasp of Galactan, either. How long does it take a Taznor to become proficient in a language? Six months? A year at the outside. The sticks been misspelling ‘free’ since the last century. I often wonder if it started as a spelling mistake, but has been retained as some quirky mark of defiance. As children, we’d often go and correct the graffiti in our neighbourhood. It got boring after we found the sticks put the ‘d’ back. They walked past the corrected daubings without showing any sign of seeing, but within a week, each was reverted.
What are we going to do with the sticks? It’s a question that more and more Taznor are becoming engrossed with. Three main factions have emerged. The largest backs doing nothing. The next campaigns for extermination. The smallest is calling for giving them the Gartland desert and highlands as a home, then leaving them to it. Not sure that’s any different from extermination – except in how quick they’ll die – but that faction is gaining support.
This article aims to give you
“Monkrel? What are you doing?”
I look up from the screen to see Tassil leaning on the doorframe. She looks haggard. I guess I look the same.
“Reading the piece I was preparing for the convention.”
She grins.
“I presume it’s been cancelled?”
I go over to embrace her.
“Yes to both. I’m never going to finish it, and the convention was deemed superfluous.”
Tassil breaks away and leads me into the kitchen.
“What now?”
Gazing at the patterns on the ceiling, I shrug.
“I’ve made an academic living pontificating about the causes and effects of the Detrin Regime, with a focus on the aspects emphasised by Taznor histories, and the tacit wishes of my sponsors.”
She hands me a drink.
“What now?”
What now, indeed? Actually, I know what comes next. I’ve just been too scared to face it. I grin at her.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Always.”
“During my studies and investigations, I’ve come across a lot of material, not all of it Detrin in origin, that conflicts with official histories. Of course, I found it easy to dismiss, because of the proofs provided by the way we lived. But…”
She comes and leans against me.
“Since one of the fundamental tenets has been blown apart, you’re wondering what else we’ve been told differs from actual events.”
I step back and take her hands.
“True. They always said they would be freed. We were taught to ridicule their poor grasp of our language. Twelve days ago, something so big our sensors couldn’t interpret it arrived, and came partially into our atmosphere without causing any adverse effects. Over the following six minutes, every Detrin vanished. Then the whatever-it-was departed, leaving the words ‘we are free’ burned three meters deep in strokes a metre wide into the paving of Victory Plaza – done with a device we couldn’t detect.”
“Do you think the Detrin will hold any further grudge?”
“That’s the worry which has been keeping me up at night.”
by submission | Apr 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: Andrew Dunn
Snow outside sparkled like a thousand diamonds in a royal vault. William didn’t feel its warmth. Instead, he wielded a poker to stoke dying embers until they glowed bright and hot enough to send fresh logs smoldering. A simple task, but it warmed William’s spirits—as a young man he’d relied on servants for such chores. The weight of cold iron in his hands was welcoming, a reminder of swords he’d forfeited long ago for her.
She’d stolen his heart the night she strode into the last ball he held as the crown’s heir. Merger of his life with it palaces, and hers as a scullery lass, sent stinging words ricocheting in his father’s marble chambers, and stirred a turbulent mood among peasants straining against the king’s yoke. William wasn’t about to let his father, the king, tell him who to marry. He stormed out of royalty the day after his father dispatched Royal Guards to deal with what he called village miscreants.
“You’re not a prince anymore?” She asked William as he ushered her on to a wagon.
“My father can send the guard,” William answered, “but he can’t stop change. He’ll have to step down, or settle for a figurehead regency. We’ll be fine. I’ve joined the regular army to be an airship navigator.”
***
William dipped his hand into a sack of oats, their bristly but soft texture against his skin reminded him how his decision and clapboard quarters at his garrison didn’t set well with her. But for him each mission was like turning storybook pages—he sighted dragons circling misty peaks, tracked orc movements in distant foothills, and spent nights in raucous outposts full of wannabe magicians, gamblers, and enough lore to fill a library.
Excitement of flying was intoxicating enough that William ignored what was right before his eyes when he came home after weeks plying skies: for her, his choice had been a shove down a ladder toward the life she’d endured before fae magic gowned her, and delivered her to his last ball.
When William was gone, she volunteered on garrison with other wives, mending uniforms, then visiting with conscripts in the infirmary. It wasn’t fae magic that kindled her heart’s fading embers for a lanky southerner with midnight-colored hair and a voice full of music. During their talks, he’d sing a verse, then promise, “Ma’am, once I’m better I’m going to be the kind of knight that slays dragons.”
***
As William watched icicles start to drip off his cottage’s eaves, he laughed away memories of tears that had rolled down his face when he first learned of her and the conscript. The conscript’s words were the first cuts of many that severed whatever love wasn’t lost between William’s stolen heart, and hers he wasn’t able to fill.
His laughter came easy, in a stone cottage where he lived amongst memories—there were framed charts he’d plotted on the walls as reminders of exceptional missions, medals in a case on his mantel and to its left, a lone glass slipper.
It was the same slipper she’d lost at his last ball as a prince, that afterward he’d taken through a half-dozen villages, until he found that her foot was the only one that fit it perfectly.
Sunlight refracted a kaleidoscope through its heel that brought back memories of palatial wardrobes, with robes that were soft against his skin the way her body had once been against his own.
He’d smashed that slipper’s glass a thousand times. Magic always restored it for William to endure.
by submission | Apr 8, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Broz
You breathe life into me, I breathe life into you. Inhale, exhale, breathe, breathe.
The fans no longer spin, nothing spins, all is still.
Face to face, inches and miles apart, we breathe through this splintered air scrubber, through each other. You breathe out, I breathe in. You keep me alive, I keep you alive. We are alive.
Eyes like oceans, fathoms deep, there is nowhere else to look, we cannot look away. Each breath your breath, each breath mine, each breath you and all of me.
This moment an eternity, an eternity in this moment.
Slowly now, you reach for the beacon, your eyes in mine, only mine in yours, only your eyes, only our eyes. Softly, slowly I touch your arm. In this moment, a rescue, an eternity away, an eternity in this moment.
by submission | Apr 7, 2023 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
Grandpa Damon leaned back in the recliner by the bay window. The late afternoon sun set his bronze face aglow. He turned to his grandson, Dominic, and said, “Son, Pluto is really two people. They are a planet and the God of the underworld.”
Grandpa Damon Carra spent several nights each week at his daughter’s house. He said he slept best when he stayed in the guest room she (Angelica) and her husband, Derek, offered him. At home, Mr. Carra complained to Angelica; Carolina always woke him up to shush him.
“You’re snoring again, Dam,” she would say, pushing her elbow into his side.
“So much better that I don’t have sleep apnea!” he would grunt. Then Damon would neglect to turn over and fall asleep again and commence to snore. Carolina would once more wake him with an elbow, only this time to his belly.
“Damn it, Cara. I will go and sleep and Angel’s place all week!”
“I wish you would.” Carolina muttered as she left the room.
“Grandpa,” Dominic asked, “Is it true you are an astronomer?”
“I was, yes.”
“And that you discovered a planet?”
Damon smiled. “Where did you hear that, Dom?”
“Mom said so. She said you discovered Pluto.”
“I didn’t. A man -a friend!- named Clyde Tombaugh did. Poor old Clyde. Do you know they said his planet is not actually a planet? It was once one of the ‘big nine’ in our solar system. And then they said, ‘No, it’s not a planet, Clyde. We call it a dwarf planet.’ Well, my buddy had to defend the majesty of that frozen rock he found in deep space. And do you know who caused all the trouble?”
“Who?” Dominic asked.
“Charon!”
“Who’s that?”
“Charon is Pluto’s wife. She’s the moon that orbits Pluto so closely that, from Earth, it looks like she and Pluto are one planet. Like an old married couple! But you can’t have coupled planets. Planets must be singular. Pff!”
Angelica brought her father a glass of lemonade and set it down on the small wooden stand beside the recliner. Then she returned with a glass for Dominic, who gave his mother a big smile.
“Look at these glasses, Dom,” Damon said. “They are practically the same size.”
“They are the same size, Grandpa!”
“No, they are close to the same size. They are like Pluto and Charon. They are so alike in size; you cannot tell the difference. But here’s the thing! If you look really closely, you can see how they are not the same. Your glass looks more golden yellow than mine in the sunshine. Why? Is it the qualities of your glass, or is it because the ratio of sugar to water in your glass is different than mine?”
“Can I taste yours, Grandpa? I want to solve the mystery.”
“I like your thinking. Go ahead.”
The boy took two large gulps, one from each glass.
“So? What’s the answer?”
Dominic wiped his mouth and said, “I don’t know. My tongue likes them both. It sees the same amount of sugar.”
“Sees the sugar. That’s good. So, imagine you are looking at Charon and Pluto through a telescope. What you see are two things that look the same. Which is the planet, and which is the moon? Astronomers thought Charon was only different from Pluto because she was a little smaller. And since she was the moon and orbited Pluto so closely that Pluto also orbited her, they got paired up and dismissed from that big nine planetary list.” Grandpa Damon shook his head. “Does my glass of lemonade have to be a lot bigger than your glass to make your glass a dwarf glass? Or are they both still glasses?”
“They are both glasses, Grandpa.”
“Right. Size does not matter. Take Jupiter. It is mostly gas. It is a planet, and so is Earth! And Earth is mostly water and rock with far fewer gasses. Is Jupiter the planet, or is Earth?”
“Jupiter is much bigger, but they are both planets.” Dom said.
“That’s right. Size does not matter. And something funny is that Mercury is about the same size as Pluto.”
“Yeah,” Dom said. “So, why is it a planet, but Pluto isn’t?”
“I tell you, Dom. I tell you; Charon is the problem. She is so close to her husband, and he is so close to her that they are attracted to each other. Jupiter has so many more moons than Pluto, but Jupiter is not affected by any of them because they are so small. None are so close in size to make any difference to Jupiter. Jupiter orbits no one save the sun, so it gets to be special. But Pluto doesn’t because astronomers have an issue with dependency! They don’t like that Pluto needs Charon!”
“Astronomers don’t mind dependency, Dad,” Angelica said, entering the room. “They know that planets depend on the sun.”
“Well, the sun is a God! And all things depend on Gods.”
“But so is Pluto. You were just telling Dom that.”
“Ok. Let me be clear. Pluto is different because, in the Roman myth, he needed company. He had to have Proserpina stay in the underworld with him. Zeus didn’t need company. To him, everyone was the same. But his brother, Pluto, was lonely. He valued companionship. And astronomers have it in for lonely planets!”
As Dom nodded in agreement, Angelica put her hand on her father’s shoulder. “I’m going to make a phone call.”
A few minutes later, Carolina entered the room. She sat down beside her husband and held his hand. Neither one said anything. Dom went into the kitchen and brought out two more identical glasses of lemonade, which he handed to each grandparent.
“Grandma, you will never be able to tell the difference between these glasses. They are like the planets Charon and Pluto, two gods who are inseparable!”
by submission | Apr 6, 2023 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
This is how I see it. The land mass is vast and the population is sparse. The people are scattered across it and the Settlements sprouted where something was still standing. Amongst the ruins of housing estates and of larger buildings; hospitals, schools and factories. They built up against the old walls and shored up the dilapidated and rickety structures, recycling what could be salvaged from the rubble.
Later, they improved on these early makeshift shelters building bigger and better and a hierarchy was quickly established based on one’s usefulness, abilities and skills. But once the Settlements had taken root and the heavy ground work had been done this hierarchy began to change and the Scholars took control.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know that what the Scholars did is important. They were the gatherers of our history. They quite literally instructed the people to go out and find it. To search for the literature, for the books and the newspapers and the magasines, for any scrap of paper with words printed or written on it. No matter how degraded or unreadable, the instructions were for the people to bring it back. The search was hard and time consuming. After all, the Alteration had consisted of much flooding and water and paper don’t mix; the one turns the other to mush.
But the people trekked far and wide and they did manage to search out all of the surviving literature and they brought it back and it was enough. And the Scholars put it in order, into sequence so that we wouldn’t forget how much people were capable of, how much they had achieved. The Scholars preach this is to what we should aspire, to keep on building bigger and better.
