by submission | Dec 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
When we found her, the Marsport Mary should have been dark and silent, or a wreck. Instead, the lights burned, the life support systems ticked over, the computers hummed… but there was nobody aboard. The salvage crews are bringing her in this afternoon; no doubt she’ll be in the news for a while. I won’t be watching: I’m scared, and I’d rather forget.
She’d been “overdue: presumed lost” in the shipping lists for seven weeks, after failing to return from a survey into the Belt. We only came across her by accident, on a run of our own. Her engines were disengaged and she was drifting, enigmatic, a metallic speck in the vastness of the solar system.
The Captain risked sending two of us over to see why. Pat and I, chosen by lot as the away team, mentally prepared ourselves for a traditional horror: the aftermath of a micrometeorite strike, contagion or a crewmember gone berserk. What we found was an empty shell.
We went over every inch of her: utility spaces, crawlways, sample holds, stores, labs, rest areas, everything. There was nobody there. The quarters for the twelve crew were neat, bunks made up, with family pictures and personal devices. The canteen automata were functional. The equipment was properly stowed, the EVA suits all present and racked. The emptiness was an almost physical pressure, and strange echoes made us jumpy.
Nothing suggested violence or disaster; there were no suspicious smears or residues or bodily fluids, no notes or scrawled messages. On the bridge the downloaded logs showed nothing unusual, just records of minor mineral deposits located. The distress call hadn’t been activated, the emergency systems were idle. A single 3-person escape pod was missing, but even that couldn’t account for all the missing.
“This creeps me out,” I admitted on the voice net. I sure as hell wasn’t taking off my suit, however much the bioscans insisted there was nothing unexpected here.
“There’s got to be something,” said Pat. “People don’t just vaporise, do they?” But there was nothing.
“We’ll mark the asteroids they surveyed as potentially dangerous,” the Captain interrupted, “Something might have happened to them there.”
“Like what?” asked Pat, “Because I’m telling you, I have no clue.”
“If I knew, there’d be no ‘potentially’ about it.”
“This is plain weird. Can we claim for salvage at least?” I asked.
“And get accused of running a scam? Or blamed for… whatever this was?” said the Captain sardonically. “Not worth it. Fire up her beacon, and I’ll message Corporate. Someone else can come and get her. Maybe they’ll have more ideas.”
So eventually the insurance company did send someone out, and she’s coming home to Mars today. There’s been speculation, but no conclusions.
I can’t go back to work without knowing what happened out there. It could have been us. Asleep, my dreams are haunted by her absent crew. Awake, I’m terrified: was this first contact? Or something else?
by Hari Navarro | Dec 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Approaching Stalag VII A — Moosburg — 1945
He walked and as he walked the cloth of his trousers stuck to his skinny legs as the rapier cold tried to eat of his skin.
The tree on the hill to the side of his ice-pecked eyes felt too the weight of this most bitter of winters and it creaked, but he did not hear it. Though, nonetheless, he looked at it and he imagined it’s shiver.
“It is awfully cold. It matters not if the sun is out there is ice on the ground all day”, he muttered, in recollection of the last letter he had sent home from the camp. And his throat it tastes of bits of the inside of his mouth and the snow he has sucked from his sleeve.
He remembers his parents and he remembers their house in Wanganui. The railway tracks that slid as cold case-hardened iron nailed reassurance just behind the back-yard fence. And he remembers the smell of boiled potatoes and butter and wilted mint.
Frank smiles.
This war has been good to him. In that he had not felt the lead that pushes through skin and fragments inside of meat. He is alive and that was the greatest thing about just about anything at this moment as he squinted at this fucking nothing tree.
But then he has an image, a thing that aches in his head. A friend lost but then found. A man with a family – as all we have. Not a friend, but an acquaintance, a boy/ man with whom he’d played a few hands of Bridge.
The snow is a many faceted thing, its purity so clearly showing the intruding filth. His body, this boy from a farm, he that loved the smell of oil that sleeps in wool, diced down and into the icy mulch beneath the tread of a benzin breathing tank.
Frank had looked upon this ruin and he had tried to cry. But ropes bound in his throat and the liquid drew into itself and pulled his eyes almost but closed. And he walked on and his toes froze in his boots and he pounded his fist at his thigh. And he said…
“This thing, this truth of who we are. This rot which foams and spits on all our branches. I will find you. I will end you. I will.”
Hundreds of millennia later and on a far away planet Francis stands and feels the ice-welded glue of her finger upon the trigger.
“I have tracked you through both time and the space between it. Now you die”, she says as, without further hesitation, she fires and a finely carved missile carves through the putrid mist and opens away its fat head like a bit of bitten fruit and it crashes down unto its cracking knees.
“Thank you…”, it whimpers as whimper it fucking well should and it folds down and into a ratcheting foetal ball.
And Francis kicks its flabby belly with the tip of her boot and she staggers backward as she feels the weight of its death.
“There ya go we did it, Franky. Took a few thousand years but we knocked the bastard off”.
by Julian Miles | Dec 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’d been a grim day spent fending off morning and afternoon assaults by enemy forces. Wave after wave of troops. Minimal armour, and a lot of their kit looks past third-hand.
They’re low on heavy manufacturing capabilities after their industrial heartland was destroyed. We tried neutron bombing to minimise damage, but they just herded more workers in, regardless of casualties. So we became war criminals by leaving them nothing to sacrifice workers in.
Anyway, I’m lighting a cigar and thinking of home when someone screams. I shout as I roll off the bed.
“Echo Unit!”
I run from my tent, grabbing a flamethrower as I pass the rack. Sod subtlety. It’s night, I’m tired, and three attacks in a day is just not on.
We race to the line and find utter chaos. I’m trying to make head or tail of it when an enemy trooper lurches out of the darkness, one arm and half his head missing. Sergeant Chames puts three into it. It goes down, then tries to get back up!
I see another walking wreck that looks intact apart from a length of girder through its chest.
“Catch that one.”
Leaping up onto a six-wheeler, I go all-channels on the comms.
“All units, shoot their legs out from under them. Fall back to the six-wheeler park. Flamethrower teams stand by.”
It takes two minutes to sort comrades from chaos. When the only upright soldiers before me are moving like extras from a zombie movie, it’s time.
“Burn the line! Incendiaries to their rear. Send fragmentation long over.”
No more of this stupidity. We deal with it and leave a tangle of nastiness to foul any left. Come first light, we’ll walk fire across any ground we missed.
My lads ‘n’ lassies have the one I wanted tethered by four ropes.
“Somebody get a crate, get a tarpaulin round that abomination, pop it inside, then send it to the scientists. Tell them we need to know what’s happening, and we need to know very, very quickly.”
The next morning is no fun at all, but we clear our lines out to 500 metres, using Warthog strikes to stop the enemy trying anything nastier.
Our Warthogs may be old, but they’re phenomenally effective. We got them at an auction when there was a big sell-off after some nation or other went tits up. Came with stacks of extras, too.
I get back to find a memo from the scientists. Somebody must have lit a fire under them to get results this quick. It’s bigger than usual, full of technical detail and long words, but they know who they’re dealing with now: they’ve added a neat summation in layman’s terms. Scientists are why we’re all still here. The fact they occasionally need interpreters so most people can grasp the basics of the wizardry they do is fine by me.
This case is rather special, though. Seems there was some research done back at the beginning of the twenty-first century into little bits of the brain called ‘glia’. Those fellas have an alarming habit of waking up and growing tiny ‘limbs’ a few hours after the owner of the brain gets themselves killed.
Somehow, the enemy scientists, having no respect, have come up with a way to make those glial cells do what they do to the bits that make a body move. Only lasts a few hours, but the scare factor alone is worth it.
It’s a nasty process, involving injections into the brain. Another reason to win soon – before our side works out how to do it too.
by submission | Dec 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alyson Tait
I moved across the state and into the apartment alone. My keys opened the front door on April 1st, like a prank to my former partner.
During the summer, bright green leaves smear sap across the city, and streaks stain car windows, an improvement to the pollen that coats the sidewalks in April.
In the long winter, the branches of the barren tree scrape against my bedroom window.
When I complain, maintenance tells me they already trimmed them back, as far away from the building as they can.
They say the tree is too bare to bother me, but the sound alone makes them liars. The same sound reminds me of my overbearing mother.
A wailing banshee come to eat.
Nails on a chalkboard.
A delusional siren ignoring her target’s closed off minds and wondering if her failures are because she just hasn’t been loud enough
The noise was jarring — distracting — invading. After a year and a half, it invaded my thoughts. In the winter, the scratching branches even invaded my dreams. They entered my nightmares and called to me, fingertips tapping against the frosted glass.
The tree and its ugly skeleton limbs showed me my favorite Ferris Wheel, the one upstate that fell apart last summer.
It danced with my ex, a smile on her pale, narcissistic face.
It dipped my favorite book into a pool of warm blankets.
The tree knew me so well, despite my silence all that time.
“Alice,” it called, “come play.”
It’s lonely, like the rest of us. I could hear that in its voice, in the way it tippy-tapped against my window when the moon was full.
The tree had no withered brethren, so it sought whoever lived beyond the window.
My name isn’t Alice.
I’ve only known one, in fact. The last ex who never loved anyone but herself, and who later shortened her name to Ali. She would tap her fingers against the coffee table when she grew bored.
Thin little fingers with fingernails that would scrape against surfaces.
One night I wondered, as a car drove by and filled my room with yellow light if perhaps the tree had gotten confused. Absorbed a memory as I slept those early nights of my lease.
Maybe the lonely beechwood had heard the name and thought someone more willing than I lived there. It didn’t have eyes, after all.
Not since maintenance cut it back, at least.
Perhaps Alice would have gone and played, straddling the wider branches and laughing at the destruction they both caused.
By the middle of February, lack of sleep and nerves leave me tired, breathless, and easy to yell.
No energy to play, or deal with flowers and candy, or complain to management- again.
Instead, I took sleeping pills and waited for spring.
I bought new headphones and waited for the leaves to come back and smother the branches and their noises, and as I fell asleep – I tried to control my thoughts to steer my dreams. Like maybe the wind will carry the news over to the rightful over of the name being whispered every night to me.
When it finally worked, I dreamt I could float and watch myself outside my body. I sat on a nearby tree and held my breath for the longest time — waiting to see myself breathe.
by submission | Dec 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Of course there were doubters. Of course they said it couldn’t be done. But, of course, that’s how it has always been done. Blowing across the Pacific on log rafts. Clawing up Everest in tweed jackets with brittle hemp ropes. Blasting to the moon in a tin can built with slide rules.
I don’t blame the doubters. I’d been one of them myself. I mean, who in their right mind would believe you could launch yourself to Mars on a mag-lev railgun in a salvaged WWII submarine?
You’re right if that sounds batshit crazy. It is. To any regular Joe. But the dreamer who did it, who actually batshit did it, wasn’t a regular Joe. She was Jo Jo McRocket.
I kid you not.
Jo Jo McRocket. Self-named. Self proclaimed. Conqueror of Mars.
It’s still incomprehensible that Jo Jo made it to Mars. I mean, we were from the nowhere town of Pilot Rock in the nowhere vastness of eastern Oregon. When we were growing up there, and she was simply my neighbor, Josie Kerr, how could she even imagine this batshit crazy idea?
Pilot Rock is not a place that necessarily inspires a lot of dreams, except maybe getting out of our one-dog town. And I guess Jo Jo did. And became a space pilot to boot. Piloting the first manned craft to Mars. Even if it was a submarine she bought at a salvage auction and had trucked hundreds of miles inland from a navy shipyard near Seattle.
How’d she manage it? No one really knows except it took all her forty-two years to get it done. It’s hard to say when she went from dreaming to actually scheming. The building up to blasting off is easier to track.
Jo Jo had the curiosity of a scientist, the discipline of an engineer and the humor of an undertaker. Maybe the best way to convey her approach to conquering Mars is something she told me when we were in junior high and the new mag-lev superloop opened between Portland and Seattle.
“We’re never going to see something like that in Pilot Rock. Unless we slapdash it.” When I looked at her funny, she looked at me seriously. “Slap it together fast and get ready to dash to the Emergency Room.”
Jo Jo knew that to be first to Mars, to cut through all the naysaying, she’d have to be a bit bat-shit crazy. She’d have to slapdash her dream together, let it rip and pick up again and again whenever it broke.
She did. And she got broke a lot along the way, physically, emotionally, financially. But she kept slapdashing at her dream.
Only she knows how it finally came together. I can drive out the thirty miles from Pilot Rock to the ranch she bought in her twenties, and see the mag-lev railgun she secretly built over two decades. But I have no idea how she converted a WWII submarine into a vehicle capable of getting her to Mars.
NASA hasn’t said how it was possible either. Jo Jo’s conquest of Mars took them by surprise. Took the world by surprise. In private, I think the government agents and engineers investigating the launch are in awe of her. Though in public they tow the “batshit crazy Jo Jo” line.
In fact, folks don’t say “batshit crazy” anymore. They just say “that is so Jo Jo” or “you are totally Jo Jo.”
I get it. It’s hard to comprehend how she did it, or what made her think she could do it. All I’ll say is that Jo Jo McRocket had bat-shit belief.
And we will never see that again. She slapdashed her way to Mars and knew all along there was no Emergency Room for when it all broke on that cold, red planet. Because it did. She knew that. And still she went. Of course she did.
Rafting the Pacific. Scaling Everest. Blasting to the moon. Conquering Mars.
It’s all the slapdash same. All batshit crazy. Until it isn’t.
by submission | Dec 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
When the migrant birds first arrived on this continent, they marveled at how few upright, two-legged hominids there were. They could fly for miles and spy only a few small gatherings.
They found most of the hominids in meadows and glens, grazing on high grasses whose oily seeds they plucked from billowing blades. The hominids were resourceful and moved in packs. The migrants, fascinated by these creatures, listened to their grunting, guttural language and wondered what these strange creatures could be debating.
The migrants encountered resident birds, fellow winged creatures with brighter plumage but reticent dispositions. These colorful cousins were masters of the higher elevations, dominating treetops and rock ledges. Their nests, while not as ornate as the ones to which the migrants were accustomed back home, were nevertheless sturdy and did not buckle in heavy wind and weather. But the resident birds possessed an odd habit of abandoning the ground to the hominids. They showed no interest in influencing hominid behavior.
These birds bored the migrants, who studied the hominids with fascination. They hunted for their grounds nests and studied their dietary habits. The migrants wondered whether these odd, hair-covered creatures who went everywhere on their hind legs had any aspirations or were they content to live at the mercy of the forests and meadows. Unlike their cousins in this new land, the migrants had learned agricultural arts and cultivated fruits, nuts, and berries to suit their tastes. It puzzled them that anyone, least of all a fellow flyer, would not reshape the landscape in its own image. And there was so much land….
The migrants crossed unbroken forests and soared over swaybacked mountains that slumped down into still more forests. There were wide rivers of purest blue and tributary creeks with arms resembling threads of gossamer. The forests were everywhere webbed with water; sweet water that seldom clogged with mud or silt. The migrants could hardly believe the taste of this land.
Where the forests gave way to scattered clumps of trees and increasingly wide growths of tall grass, there were again a few scattered hominids, now more plainly visible to migrant scouts who glided many hundreds of feet above. And where the hominids roamed the grasses, so did large four-legged creatures who outran the two-legged with ease. These beings, with their horns and black wool were scarcely different than some of the wild horned bellowing beasts the migrants knew at home. The only difference was these creatures were considerably larger and somehow hairier.
The grasses overtook the trees, and soon there were no trees at all. Then the grasses shortened, and the hominids disappeared. The migrants noticed that rivers were also increasingly scarce, and some of the spidery creeks that fed them dried up in the unshaded weather. But then a rainstorm would come, the creeks would flood, and the water would flow as sweet as any other river and creek they had so far tasted.
There were mountains now to rival those of home, peaks with snow on them during the summer months. And these mountains had trees and large flows of ice recalling the great glacial ranges the migrants had explored on their turf of origin. In some ways, this new land was not so radically different, and among the highest peaks, the migrants grew bored. They considered how if they had seen one mountain, they had seen them all, especially since no hominids had been spotted for hundreds of miles.
But then, as they descended from the highest peaks into lesser ones and finally into an area of salt-tasting water and shivering heat, the migrants found that this land was not like home at all. They could not eat the stones and sand granules that replaced the grass. There were no more berries and the insects they found were stinging, with claws and bristly hairs that forbade good eating.
There seemed to be no relief, only a scorching mockery. The one large lake the migrants found was undrinkable, so saturated with salt was it that it made the migrants sick. They thirsted worse after sampling its waters. In the throbbing landscape about them, they saw ghostlike beings with spikes on their heads moving through this wavering world that made large objects -impossibly large objects- seem to float in midair. The migrants could hardly believe what they were seeing, and in their surprise, they turned on one another, plucking out feathers and leaving their weaker brethren and sistren for dead on the searing flats. The shrunken flock that made it to a new line of cooling mountains was a fraction of the original party that had set out to bound and define this new land.
It was on a night of no moon that they came to the wall of cold peaks that marked a coda to the salt-encrusted landscape that had driven even the hardiest migrants nearly mad with thirst. These were frigid heights, and after an unmeasured stay in the desert, the migrants found their wings seized with cold; they plummeted to rocky ledges that were glazed with frost. Several in the party slid off into crevasses and found their bodies broken in pitch black ravines, while others were shattered by the jaggedness, the adamantine indifference of the alpine stones.
By morning, a handful of migrants remained. As the sun rose, the rocks heated and thawed, loosening the feathers, the bone and sinew of their wings. The remnant party, still helpless, watched as a hominid, clutching a long pole cast in obsidian shadow, speared each one of them into darkness.
