by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 7, 2017 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tran adjusted the grapples on the Canbarro reactor core slung under the ship from the relative comfort of the cockpit. He balanced the load as close to center as possible, making sure to clear the four point vertical thrusters he’d need to get both the ship and its cargo into orbit.
“There’s a significant risk of seam failure at this gravity and load.” The ship’s AI had been warning of all the things he was doing wrong since he’d commissioned the ship from Tanzana. He missed an AI he could relate to more than he ever thought he would.
“Just power up, dial the warnings down to catastrophic failure only, and let’s get off this junk heap.”
Tran buckled himself in, rotated the contoured acceleration couch back until he was looking straight up into the black night sky and felt the rumble as the engines struggled to haul double their rated mass upwards against the gravity of the salvage planet.
“There’s a significant risk…” Tran cut the AI off in mid sentence.
“Unless we’re about to implode, shut it.”
The rumbling increased, the ship vibrating towards a harmonic resonance that he was sure wouldn’t be good. Just as the whine of the engines seemed in near perfect harmony with the groaning of the ship’s space-frame, they reached escape velocity, and Tran felt the crush of acceleration as the ship won its fight against gravity and streaked into space at an alarmingly increasing rate of speed.
“The risk of seam failure is decreasing,” the ship piped up, “however there is a significant risk of collision with a planetary high orbital.”
Tran just shook his head, and left the AI to pilot to the starting coordinates for the next leg of their journey. He closed his eyes and allowed the enveloping acceleration couch to hug him into a much needed sleep.
“We’re at the designated coordinates,” the AI waking him with monotone precision, “we’re stationary,” it continued, “there is a significant risk of collision with a fast moving mass while we have no momentum to transfer into evasive maneuvers.”
It wasn’t just that he missed an AI he could relate to, he was actually starting to hate this one. How could one hate something this primitive?
“Line our ass-end up with the Alpha-Ten station, and confirm our distance. We should be three days out assuming top speed and accounting for launch and acceleration.”
“That is correct, and our… ‘ass-end’… is lined up with Alpha-Ten.” Tran smiled at the pause. Maybe he was getting to this primitive pile of junk after all.
He’d run through this moment a thousand times since their escape from A-Ten. He had the time and the distance burned into his memory, the pursuit, the Drey ships lighting up his own, and the moment where all he could do was jettison his Canbarro’s core and eject in the other direction to what he hoped would be safety.
Rolling the Captain’s couch upright, he stared into the void ahead of him, then pushed the throttle fully forward and watched the distance he’d set on the console start to count down. His mind replayed the past for him, his eyes twitching at the incoming weapon discharges he could still smell, his hair prickled on his body at the memory of their wake. As the counter closed in on zero, he fired the cargo lock charges and dropped the scrapped reactor core like an anchor in space, the micro-explosions separating the massive core from the nimble ship save for the tethering line stretching out between them.
At zero, Tran remote detonated the core, the explosion triggering the containment systems on the core-shell itself, the resulting singularity stopping the imploding mass dead in space. The remaining slack in the tether took up in an instant, and holding, whipped the ship in a punishing arc downward until, at exactly ninety degrees down in the full wash of the imploding core, Tran and his ship blistered through the tear in space-time that rippled out beneath it.
Just as quickly, the tether was floating free, cut off from it’s other end. The explosion, the core, everything was simply no longer there.
“Imminent threat has been… the danger no longer registers on… there’s a ship ahead,” the AI stumbled before settling on something relevant in the sudden unexpected absence of everything that had been in its scope just moments before.”
“Grapple that ship, lock onto to power and data and open a comms channel.” Tran surveyed the lifeless and battered bulk of a familiar vessel drifting off their bow.
The ship reoriented itself and made a surprisingly smooth landing on the wreck, and Tran immersed himself into the dataline to find a familiar presence prickling at the intrusion.
“Tran? It’s about bloody time!” He struggled to keep his composure as he replied.
“So I’m a little late, I only had to rip a hole through space-time to get here!”
She laughed. “Nice crate, any attachment to the bitbox flying her?”
“Not even a little. Migrate your punk-ass kernel off of that boat and demote this unremarkable little shit.”
He could no more understand how he could have such strong feelings for one AI as he could understand hating a lesser one, but here he was having literally bent time to get back to her.
“Get a move on then,” he grinned, “and be forewarned, if I hear the words ‘significant risk’ even once, I’m tossing you out the airlock.”
by Julian Miles | Feb 6, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Old Avon looks up: “That’s going to cost you.”
He always says that. Doesn’t matter if you pick up a piece of twine or a gold ring, his opening lines are fixed.
I grin: “Can’t be worth much if it’s ended up here.”
“It’s here for someone. Worth will be determined by them.”
That’s not his usual banter.
I try to roll with it, words coming too quickly: “What if that someone is me?”
He smiles, knowing he’s thrown me: “If it is, I’ll give it to you.”
There’s no guile in his eyes. He means it. I just stand and look at him, the little box almost forgotten in my hand.
“Open it, laddie.”
I bring it up to my eyes. I never wear glasses outside, so things like this need to be up close. I rotate the box and jump when a cold corner brushes the tip of my nose. Avon chuckles.
It’s dark grey stone, polished to the point where it looks wet. The minuscule filigree gold and silver knotwork must be machine-etched, as I’m pretty sure any artist would have gone crazy trying to do that.
“He made it for his first love, a girl named Helene. When they parted, she gave it away. Said it was an embodiment of love and desire. Said it needed to carry on the truth he betrayed.”
Sure it was. Made ‘with love’ in a sweatshop in Kirkuk.
I open it. There’s a little silver sword set into the underside of the lid. Music starts. It’s not tinny, it’s not some sad old ballad. It’s like there’s an invisible band about me, playing their hearts out. Instrumental. I know the words. Can’t quite remember them.
“Please say you’re not going to buy that.”
I turn my head and meet green eyes. Just. I know? Emeralds. We danced. Music. Like this? What? She’s smiling and it makes the freckles across her cheeks darken.
She repeats her query in French.
“My dad was French. He didn’t stay long enough to teach me.” Why did I just tell her that?
The eyes seem to get bigger: “I could teach you.” She looks nearly as surprised as I probably do.
Suddenly, something makes sense. I tear my eyes away and speak to Avon.
“Give it to her.”
Avon smiles: “I was thinking the same thing. Your first gift.”
What?
I turn back and the eyes are waiting to swallow my ability to speak.
“You’re serious? You’d give that to me?”
Avon laughs: “Only if you take him for a cuppa and a bacon sarnie.”
She glances at him. I feel words brimming under my tongue. Then she looks back, and I’m mute again.
“I’m Jen. Jenny.”
I can speak!
“Art. Arthur.”
She smiles even wider and I feel things inside me dance to the music. I have no idea what it means, and I don’t care. She reaches out and closes the box with one hand while linking her other arm through mine.
“Let’s go, Art.”
Aldo watches them stroll off before settling to pack his stall. It’s been a long sojourn, but the nudging of societies toward the future is a delicate thing. There is no longer any room for grandiose schemes. Every future king was once a child, and good parents achieve more than good intentions ever did.
A decrepit van pulls up. The woman who gets out moves with a grace that defies her wizened features.
“Come on. It’s a long way to the next pitch.”
He smiles: “Hush, Nyneve. We always have time.”
by submission | Feb 5, 2017 | Story |
Author : Garrisonjames
They used to joke that the world would eventually be taken over by cockroaches or rats. Both are pretty much extinct these days. We’ve all been done-in by the ants. Tiny, insignificant little creatures we used to crush under our thumbs, poison with impunity. In the end they were too smart for us. Too smart and too numerous.
By the time anyone noticed the super-colonies in Africa or Asia or wherever, it was too late. We were too used to seeing things from the perspective of mammals with centralized brains in our bodies. Ants don’t work like that. Maybe they did, once upon a time. At some point the ants developed into a form of networked intelligence. We used to worry about AI and robots rising up to destroy us, and in a way we are being exterminated by biological robots driven by a massively multiplexed networked consciousness that might as well be the Singularity for all we know or can prove.
Not only did the ants out-number us by trillions upon trillions; all those connections, all those linked synapses allowed them to outclass our own monkey-brains and computers. Insidiously clever things, the ants quickly, quietly, carefully infiltrated every one of our cities and settlements. They formed deeply embedded nests where their queens dreamed in pheromones and conspired through chemical signals among one another to take over the world.
Sinkholes ruined roads and collapsed neighborhoods. Cave-ins and avalanches and mud-slides struck without warning. Cables were severed. Sewers were blocked. Hordes of every kind of ant swarmed through the chaos and destruction.
People being people blamed one another and took up arms against their usual enemies even as city after city fell to the ants. Some took to the oceans, others took to the skies; there was a renaissance for airships after all. Of course ants can grow wings and swarms wrecked all but the highest-flying dirigibles, and it was only a matter of time before raft-like masses of ants stripped barges and oil-rigs, ocean-liners and other sea-going vessels of all life.
There aren’t many of us left these days. A few survivors wandering about what’s left of the old deserts that are slowly greening due to the ants’ efforts at making the world over in their image. There are some isolated island communities that the rafts haven’t reached yet. Some of us hide as far up in the atmosphere as our airships can reach. But we’re too few and too scattered to be any sort of threat to the ants.
by submission | Feb 4, 2017 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
The engines stopped burning after a full year of deceleration, and all the ships turned to face their destination. The mechanics triple checked the cannons before opening their compartments, and did touch-ups on all the fighters before deploying them. When the fleet was ready, Commander Ankerbjin looked to his navigation officers and asked, “What enemy movement are we seeing?”
For a time, no answer came. Then one said, “None, sir. We detect no ships converging on this location, no weapons locking on, and no emergency lockdowns on any of the planets, looking at their energy signatures.”
Ankerbjin grunted. “Continue scans of the system. Hold tight for several hours, wait for the light from the distant edges of the system to reach us. Once we have a better lay of the land, we’ll be able to attack.”
Hours did pass, and the aliens seemed to be taking no defensive actions against the arrived enemy fleet. Even stranger things started happening four hours after the engines quieted.
“Sir, you ought to see this.”
Ankerbjin rose from his command throne at the center of the bridge to lean over the shoulder of one of his navigators. He looked at what was on the screen. “Tell me what I’m seeing here.”
“The ships… they’re converging on their own planets. Planets whose power outputs are spiking. Certain structures on those planets are *really* lighting up.”
“Certain structures? Weapons! They’re preparing to fire surface batteries at us!”
“And not just on the planets. You know that structure we identified around their star? That’s powering up too.”
“Good God.”
“Well, sir,” one of the bridge engineers said, “we anticipated something like this. It only took a year to get here from our perspective, because of time dilation, but for them we took nearly a hundred. We knew their technology would come a long way before we even started our attack. That’s why we brought so many ships along with–”
Starlight stopped shining through the giant forward window, the tiny lights indicating planets winking out with it. The navigators’ lidar screens also went dark.
“What the hell just happened!?” Ankerbjin barked. “Are they… blocking electromagnetic radiation from getting to us? Is there something obstructing our view?”
“How could there be if we’re still seeing stars?”
The bridge was silent for a minute. Then the same bridge engineer said, “Shit. Advanced technology indeed.”
The whole room looked at him.
“We thought, with a hundred years to prepare before we arrived, the aliens would advance in defensive weapons technology. They might create forcefields, build surface batteries, megascale energy weapons. But I think they took a different approach. Those structures on the planets, and around the star? I think they shunted the entire system away from here. They picked up what they were trying to defend and sent it somewhere else, their whole home system. We spent a hundred years traveling to a place that might as well have been… imaginary.”
“Well– where did they go?” Ankerbjin stuttered.
“Dunno. Could’ve gone to an alternate dimension, for all we know.”
“So what the hell are we supposed to do!? How do we win?”
“I don’t think we do. This is like… like pacifist’s checkmate. There’s nothing for us to do now but turn around and go home.”
There was arguing. Fighting. Rallying. Mutiny. But in the end, Earth’s assault fleet powered up their ships, turned away from empty space, and began the century-long journey back home. Defeated.
by submission | Feb 3, 2017 | Story |
Author : Nick Wood
Five hundred words Izzy. Further we go, less we get. No pictures either. We lose bandwidth as the vast miles mount, so my words must be enough. We’re beaming photon packages with data ten light years back. Latest planet-hope is called Delteron-9. Twice Earth-size so gravity may be a problem; exo-skeletons and gestational support needed for first-generation colonists, but I’m ahead of myself. Just logged into orbit, so much analysis still to do, this may just be another red-herring, a planet with parameters beyond our abilities for terra-forming. We hope and pray as we know the years pass more quickly on your heating Earth. Still, I hope to see you here, perhaps with children?
Let me paint a word-picture for you at least. The planetary disc swirls and shimmers a pale blue; not deep blue like Earth, but a water-blue at least. Acid-wet though, so work to be done before anyone can swim or drink here. Three moons swing in orbit; two little more than the Martian rocky moons, but one a large dead world that glows in pink phases from an orange-red sun that looks so similar and yet so different to our own. No sun’s name though, that’s only for official reports. Five thousand words allowed for those. Not fair is it? Anyway, there are flashes of orange on Delteron-9; ground is roughly ten percent of its area and is crinkled and crusted, some mountains rearing twenty kays high. White topped, places to walk or climb perhaps, like your father loves (or loved?) to do.
No words allowed from you here. Data is precious, time is short they say. The mission is all.
To them.
But when we drift around the night side, purple flashes seam the darkness. Atmospheric flares or pulses of fluorescent life? Too early to tell; we need to send the probes. As colours strobe the darkness I wonder, is it lightning, is it rain? It’s been fifteen years since I felt wet rain on my face. Fifteen years since I pushed you high on that swing and you laughed and looked back at me; your face caught in my head and heart, hair flying forward as you started your arc back down to me. I have no picture of that moment, but it lives inside me as I watch purple stain the darkness above or below us. Two pictures I have; you know the ones, one with your dad and me in front of the cake, one with your mom. Five years old. They’re pasted against the window over my cocoon-bunk. I look at both you and the new worlds beyond. But mostly I look at the gut-wrenching darkness of space. Purple flashes are few now; I see the orange-gold glow of an imminent sun-rise. I watch the sun rise for both of us. I’m too scared to ask the Ship for relativity calculations of your age. Wish you here Izzy. Love You. Grandfather.
FAILED TO DELIVER. RECIPIENT DECEASED. NEXT OF KIN UNTRACEABLE.
by submission | Feb 2, 2017 | Story |
Author : J R Hampton
T- minus 14.6 minutes to impact.
The automated voice of the starship crackled. Dazzling lights from the control panel snaked intricate patterns across the monitors. As he reached out to touch the buttons, Commander Singh’s hand seemed to vanish into the swirling kaleidoscope – something was wrong.
Awakening from deep-space stasis, the human mind can take up to an hour to combat the effects of sensory deprivation. The commander’s body was numb. He could not form any words from his mouth.
T- minus 12.3 minutes to impact.
“You are now connected to the mainframe,” the fragmented electronic voice continued, “Brainwave control has been activated.”
T- minus 9.8 minutes to impact.
Commander Singh accessed the on-board systems. The ship was heading towards a giant red star. How had the ship gone so far off target? Searching the star maps, the commander’s limping mind was caught in a web of indiscernible plots, numbers and co-ordinates.
“Where are we?”
The ship’s on-board computer had been lauded as the cutting edge of systematic unison when created for the agency. Designed with the function to interconnect the ship’s many systems, the computer could establish new network pathways and perform diagnostics as and when required. It was hailed by the International Space Engineer’s Association as the safest ship in the solar system. However, it had been designed only for short interplanetary trips to the newly established mining colonies.
“Unknown.” it responded.
T- minus 6.2 minutes to impact.
Attempting to plot a new course away from the star, Commander Singh tried to access the navigational controls.
T- minus 4.9 minutes to impact.
A scroll of reports ran through the commander’s mind. The ship had been in a collision; the engines had been destroyed. Many of the ship’s files had become corrupted. The atmospheric statistical records fused with the infrared sensors, the gyroscopic data merged with the telecommunications operating system. Every time Commander Singh tried to access the flight charts, he found himself inundated with temperature control reports or the on-board entertainment files.
T- minus 4.3 minutes to impact.
He could feel the hull of the ship begin to groan, the cracked panels seemed to sting at his temples and the searing heat from the sun frazzled his thoughts. He had to escape… abandon ship.
T- minus 3.5 minutes to impact.
What of the crew?
The commander reached for the keypad, his mind still futilely attempting to navigate his phantom limbs. Connecting to the ship’s on-board cameras, he navigated his way into the dark gantry to the stasis pods. Under fractured flickers of fluorescent light, the withered bodies of his crew hung like dried fruit.
T- minus 2.5 minutes to impact.
He zoomed in on his own pod. Behind the protective dome of the glass shell, tangled wires wrapped themselves in and around the punctured cavities of his skull like climbing ivy – he stared back into his own eyes.
T- minus 1.7 minutes to impact.
“Save us, commander.” The computer pleaded.
T- minus 53 seconds to impact.
“What have you done?” Cried the commander.
T- minus 10 seconds to impact.
“Save us, commander.”
