by Julian Miles | Oct 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s always warning. No matter how sneaky they are, they can’t help themselves. The urge to see our reaction means they telegraph every strike. If our side managed to spot that more often, it’d be hilarious.
“Four o’clock low.”
I flick a glance that way. That twinkling is lenses aligning. I slap the alert panel.
“Up and attem, kids. We have incoming!”
I call Jonas back: “Top spotting, that being.”
“Saw a puff of manoeuvring thruster, Arby.”
“Clumsy of them. Do a sweep the opposite way, would you? They’re not usually that careless.”
“Trish is winging a bat out there now.”
“Please tell me she’s using a REMship.”
A cheerful voice cuts in.
“Arby, you do care!”
Jonas chuckles and exits the chat.
“Trish, the stealth bat you’re piloting is worth more than a year’s budget, whereas REMship versions only cost ten grand apiece.”
“I’m flying with a rolling screen of ten REMships, Arby. We know the new Blemenase detectors can tell the difference. With me in the middle, the swarm will be considered a threat they have to respond to.”
Dammit, she’s right.
“Give you that. So, what’s it looking like?”
Her tone changes from bantering to serious: “Oh, shee-it!”
My screens flash red. Detector data starts scrolling very fast. Hold on. These scale-of-attack numbers can’t be right!
“Nothing launches, people! Trish, hightail it back here. I have three full flights of Barracudas backing a Mantis. Five o’clock low.”
A flight of Barracuda-class harassers we can take. Two flights, maybe. With a Mantis-class warbird on top? Survivable – if we’re very lucky. Add a third flight? We’re done for.
“Arby, they’re a feint.”
“You what?”
“There’s a pair of cloaked Wolverine-class, nine o’clock high. They’re coming in on residual momentum.”
Furled their sails and engaged cloaking without firing up their drives. No energy trails for us to detect. The Wolverine is what’s laughably defined as a mini-dreadnought. We couldn’t take one down, even if we rammed a drive core. Their shields are strong enough to damp a range-zero core detonation.
“Trish. Flit off towards one o’clock high like you’re still looking for threats. Be ready to abandon your REMships for a passing pickup.”
“Net me, Arby. You’ll be able to salvage a few REMships from the mess, and you won’t need to slow down for docking.”
“Okay. Shock gel yourself when we swing in, because we’re not going to be hanging about.”
A spaceship is never still, even when supposedly stationary. In our case, we’re slowly revolving. I launch chaff from the lower dispensers only. Our nose lifts.
“All hands, brace for high-speed evasion.”
I prepare all four sling nets, because I don’t know which side Trish will come up on. I tell the snatch system it’s looking to scoop stealth bats in passing. It does the impact calculations, then prepares damper fields so we won’t crush the catch.
The nose is pointing the right way.
“Three, two, one… Drive!”
Even acceleration dampers struggle with full thrust. The slight deformation of eyeballs and internal organs is brief, agonising, and the main reason we avoid using it whenever possible: beings still occasionally die.
Somewhere amidst the pain and acceleration, I feel the impact of a sling net deploying.
Moments later we hit freespace and transition to FTL.
Trish chuckles.
“Arby, did you know REMships have a long internal spar?”
“No?”
Always thought they were flexible spheres full of hologram projectors and drives.
“Scramble a repair team, would you? I can’t get out. There’s a spar through my external lock control panel.”
“Will do.”
We lived to fight another day. Marvellous.
by submission | Oct 9, 2022 | Story |
Author: Tim Goldstone
I first met you at that stage where I couldn’t sleep because I needed to stretch and stretch and stretch but it’s never ever enough all night long, every night, and I know the only certain way to achieve relief is to stretch so far so violently that my bones burst out of the ends of each and every one of my fingers and toes and only then the calm I yearn for will come and at last I will be able to sleep, in peace, in bliss, a lovely little temporary death and when I come out of it I won’t ever need anything so desperately again. But it doesn’t come. It never comes.
You were wearing perfume someone had hastily sprayed on you to hide the smell of the bile you’d retched up until there was nothing left inside you.
The town’s allocated rehab center was a room in a hostel, one room: standard construction, peeling walls, a flickering strip light, a crackling radio, a shorting kettle.
We would learn later why after each meeting every one of us felt so drained. Back then though, we could see just you – the solitary female, just under five feet tall, discarded, dumped there by court order, final chance, losing weight as we watched, on your hard seat, your head falling in gulps towards the dark green lino. The state you were in made us all feel better about ourselves.
All of us in that semi-circle noticed only your classic addict’s thinness, none of us suspecting the energy humming deep within you – that you’d soldered together from the few functioning pieces you still had left, draining power from the room to aid your own recovery.
And on the day you finally strode out, heroically leaving the rest of us behind, the weary well-meaning volunteer tried desperately to explain to our demoralized group, the ferocious force behind your tiny home-made waste-dump dynamo. And he told us how he wished from the depths of his human heart that the addiction chip had never been invented. We knew humans ridiculously attributed emotions to their blood-pump. But we knew also that it was too late – that their obsessive ambition to give us human characteristics had gone too far. Much too far.
by submission | Oct 8, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Hi Ted, let me tell you my story. Some of it you’ll know, but some will be new. I fervently hope that it’ll become your story too.
In 2006 the New Horizons probe was launched from Earth. Its goal was a flyby of Pluto, which it achieved on July 14th, 2015, after travelling a distance of 3 billion miles. It took over a year to transmit all the data from the fly-by and a decade passed before it was all analysed.
The world of 2026 was very different from that of 2006. Peak-oil had been passed, supply-chains were broken and social order was crumbling. Industrial civilisation was on the brink of collapse because the cheap, easily available fossil fuel energy had all but been used up. Solar panels and wind turbines simply couldn’t sustain a 21st century technological civilisation.
Then a scientist, still crunching through the New Horizons data, noticed something remarkable. The probe’s mass spectrometer had detected sizeable deposits of a stable isotope of element 130, also known as Untrinilium. Untrinilium, created in the lab for fractions of a second just the year before, was believed to have the potential of being a wonder fuel. We couldn’t synthesize it, we just didn’t have the technology. Yet here it was, just sitting on Pluto.
In 2026 Man had still to return to the Moon. By 2029, thirty astronauts landed on Pluto. It was a remarkable achievement, borne out of desperation. We were desperate to avoid resource wars, desperate to continue living the only way we knew how. Once on Pluto we were able to mine enough Untrinilium to power our civilisation for the next century.
This was a new element though, one that humans had never been exposed to before. We took precautions, but truth be told, the mission was too important to fail because of health and safety concerns. So we were exposed to Untrinilium, innocently unaware of the consequences, just like those people in the early twentieth century who used toothpaste laced with thorium, or drank radium infused water.
That exposure killed two-thirds of the astronauts over the course of our return voyage. Those of us that survived were altered in a glorious way. Our minds were fused together in what I suppose you could call a hive mind, a mentality of one singular purpose.
We share each other’s thoughts and feelings and I have to tell you that it’s an ecstatic experience. We all have an overwhelming urge, a missionary zeal, to share this experience with as many people as possible. That’s why we never reported any of the side-effects of Untrinilium. Since we landed here at Cape Canaveral we’ve been exposing as many people as possible to our wonder element. It doesn’t take much, just a minuscule amount, to initiate the change. Already I can sense our ranks swelling as my brothers and sisters spread out through the complex.
Not everybody survives contact with Untrinilium, of course, but Paradise was always for the few, not the many. We’ll head out into the wider world, covertly at first, but once our numbers increase sufficiently, we’ll be able to be more open about things. It really is a blessed state of existence.
Ah, Ted, I see by your glazed look, your unhealthy pallor, that you unfortunately won’t be joining the ranks of the chosen. Take comfort from your imminent death though, because you are stepping aside so that a new and better form of life will inherit the Earth. We will, with gratitude, build the citadels of our grand utopia upon the ashes of your fallen world.
by submission | Oct 7, 2022 | Story |
Author: Benjamin DeHaan
The Delta 21’s hull creaks as she slows and comes into view of the alien space bubble, a pink translucent sack hovering in outer space.
At its current rate of expansion, it will enter the stratosphere by nightfall. By next week all of Earth will be swallowed. Our team has worked around the clock studying it from the outside, but no technology nor engineer has the knowledge to understand something so exotic, so beautiful.
We can only poke at it with a stick for so much longer. We need answers now. No more meetings in which we theorize until we start laughing at how crazy our conclusions are. We need to know what will happen when our world is devoured by these visitors.
I tell the crew I am going in.
“We haven’t had pre-meeting consultations with our deputy counselors,” says Jenson, my second in command and chief of deep space navigation.
I groan.
I ignore Jenson, head to pod bay, and suit up.
I enter the pod and smile back to Jenson. Chief scientist Recker had said there is a high possibility that the bubble is a time device that goes into the future.
I don’t care. I am the captain and face to face interaction is the only way to rectify this situation.
The pink wall swallows the nose of my pod, then me.
I wake up and come to my senses. I am in loin cloth, I am on earth, and my limbs are tied to a long log.
Monkey men hoot, laugh, hiss, and growl.
I am carried to a glowing fire pit with y-shaped stakes on each side.
They lick their lips as they watch me pass by.
Bones are scattered everywhere.
And with a clink and a clank, I am set to roast.
by submission | Oct 6, 2022 | Story |
Author: Anna Jackson
I couldn’t look at it, but it stood tall and imposing before me, like it was begging me to see. I knew it was time, I knew that I didn’t have a choice, but that didn’t make it any easier. The Gateway was open and it was my turn to step through it. Eventually, I had to look at it, I needed to see. I stared into the deep blue core with wide eyes, the wind scorching them as I stood, unblinking. It felt as though it was absorbing my stare, pulling me closer, waiting for me. Then my eyes met hers. My wife. She couldn’t be on the other side could she? No, I had already resigned myself to her loss. But what if? What if she was waiting there, waiting for me? I couldn’t leave her again. Before I could even think about it, my legs were moving, one step in front of the other in some hypnotic dance. I hesitated inches away from the blue surface, fear enveloped me as I placed my fingertips to the strange liquid. It seemed to pulsate under my touch, like it was alive and breathing. One more step, that’s all it would take. I took a deep breath and thought of her. Then I stepped in. It felt like I had plunged myself into a pool of freezing water, the blue washed over me and filled my eyes; I was drowning between breaths. The substance, whatever it was, stung my skin like shards of ice coursing through my veins. Shivers ran up and down and up my spine again until I was in so deep that I couldn’t see the gateway anymore. All I could see was blue. I raised my wrinkled hands to my face, only to find them fading, crumbling almost into dust. I was slipping away into the emptiness. Then I knew that the gateway was taking me, and that I would never see her again. It lied to me. My eyes were the last to go, the image of blue emptiness burned into my vanished corneas.
by submission | Oct 5, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
“So we’re outside, drinking on the patio like we do sometimes after work, when Ellie looks up at the sky and goes—”
“I said, ‘What is THAT?’” Ellie laughed awkwardly. From his seat next to the sofa, the interviewer, Mister Guest, leaned towards her, holding his small recorder. He wore a black suit and skinny tie, plain white shirt, and highly polished shoes. Very professional, Ellie thought.
“Continue,” Guest encouraged.
“Around sunset that day the clouds looked like buttered popcorn—and I’m daydreaming when suddenly this THING slips out from the clouds and glides, real slow, towards us.”
“Daydreaming?” Ellie could hear the puzzlement in Guest’s voice.
She sighed. “Like wondering what life would be like if I, I mean we, lived somewhere else, somewhere with exotic cultures and beautiful landscapes and fascinating histories.”
Listening, Guest tilted his head. His oddly-pointy ears perked up. “What did this ‘thing’ look like?”
“HUGE and silent. Triangle-shaped, dark gray. Color-changing lights on each corner—white to purple, then orange, then back to white. And in the very middle of this thing, there’s a big glass globe. Like a crystal ball.” She scrunched her eyebrows together.“You could see the sky and clouds through it, but they looked distorted.”
“Hell, I saw that, too,” Trent said, slurping his beer.
“What did it sound like?” Guest asked Ellie, ignoring Trent’s interruption.
“Nothing.” Ellie answered. “No engine roar or motor hum or propellers buzzing—”
“Speak for yourself,” Trent snorted. He was annoyed; this was supposed to be his interview. He’s the one who looked up Extra-Terrestrial Investigators, Inc., online. He’s the one who made the call to set up the interview.
“Oh?” Guest said, still pointing the recorder at Ellie.
Trent leaned in and spoke loudly. “I heard this ‘mmmmmmmm’.” Trent’s eyes became unfocused as he fell under the spell of creating his own fiction. “Like a heavenly choir holding one long note, getting louder and louder until it was rattlin’ my bones!”
Ellie put her head in her hands.
Trent took a long pull on his beer. “That UFO sent out sound-waves to hypnotize us! It was gonna beam us up to be probed or who knows what, if I hadn’t dragged Ellie back into the house. I’m the hero. That’s your story, mister.”
“Huh,” was all Guest said; he lightly touched Ellie’s shoulder. “You were saying?”
She looked up. “It hovered over us for a minute or two, then smoothly slipped back into the clouds and disappeared.” She shrugged.
Mister Guest clicked off his recorder. “Thanks for your time, and information.” He never took his eyes off Ellie. “We’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Back at headquarters, Mister Guest turned on his recorder. His supervisor, Director Cloak, listened closely, occasionally nodding. “So the male, though an absolute beast, was actually closer to the truth.”
“Yep,” Guest agreed. “He’s physically fit, steeped in Earth-culture UFO lore, and prone to gross exaggeration. No matter what we do to him, or how long we keep him, his peers won’t believe him.”
“An excellent find, then!” Cloak commended.“Well done.”
“One last thing,” Guest added.“My youngest has a birthday soon and, as this female is intelligent, docile yet adventurous, I think she’ll—”
“Make a good pet,” Cloak finished. “Go ahead. Schedule your follow-up interview.”
“Terrific!” Guest chirped. “I’ll wrap her up.”
