by submission | Jan 25, 2017 | Story |
Author : Iain Macleod
Here come another fresh load off the shuttle. I hate them, bloody smug rich earther kids here to “give something back”. Dragging their wheeled suitcases behind them, taking selfies wearing sunglasses. We’re inside a dome, morons! The sunlight is fake and nowhere near bright enough to warrant shades!
I have to greet them though, and pretend that them fucking round with patching kits or half assing a geotherm pump is really super helpful. The money they bring in makes it just tolerable.
The local dock rats watch them from further back, sneering at them and me for associating with them. Theres no shortage of labour here and many people are unemployed.
If these people thought for five minutes about the reality of what they were doing they wouldnt come here, they’d just donate cash. Instead they fly out here bringing tools and materials with them instead of buying them on mars and contributing to the economy. Then these unskilled idiots need to be babysat through the most basic jobs and pussy out as soon as they break a nail. A decent martain boy would work 12 hours a day for half the price and could support a family. His money would be spent in martian shops boosting the economy and the skills he learned could be passed on to other martians. Those willing to learn, desperate to help build a real community here, and give their lives meaning in the process.
I take a quick look at the photographs inside my wallet, my wife Claire and our daughter Marina. This is why i do it. I hate myself but i’ll do anything to keep food on the table.
Ok, deep breath in. Fake smile on.
“Hi guys! Welcome to Mars, are we ready to help some people?!”
The slackjaws all cheer and high five each other.
God i hate them.
by Julian Miles | Jan 24, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The Nighthawk café is quiet. In the dim light cast by grimy neon tubes, two men sit nursing mugs of coffee and shot glasses of whisky.
“Looks good, Crow. Looks good.”
The older of the two waves his hand, encompassing the café and buildings nearby.
“Thanks, Jonah. The ‘Nighthawk’ is the heart of this. People have so much to talk on, since the war.”
“Yeah, every man and woman served. Makes for some deep common ground. Conversations go better when you’ve got shared experience. And, if the experiences are grim enough, truths come out.”
Crow coughs and grins: “Ain’t that a fact. But, the truth that built this came from my old man. He always said ‘when everything changes, take time to watch how people change in response, before you make a move’.”
“That’s why you didn’t reopen the bar straight after disarmament?”
“Yes. Looking after a bar was a good game for lively types before the war. You should know, you were one of my regular bouncers. But, the war changed the game. So, I took the old man’s advice. Let every other joint open up, thinking business was back to normal.”
“How could it be, after ten years of hell-on-Earth?”
“Spot on. The new bars got torn to pieces, restaurants demolished, concert halls razed. Everyone knew how to fight: every brawl became a battle when you threw in PTSD and other lingering souvenirs. That’s when law enforcement resorted to simply holding perimeters until the fighting died out.”
“But you learned.”
“I did. The new place has a stage with force screens to protect the band. The arena is a single piece of cerasteel – nothing that can be torn up for use as a weapon. The bars are shuttered and all drinks come in paper mugs.”
“I miss pint glasses at gigs.”
“Levels of violence change things.”
“Sadly. So, I understand the Nighthawk, and ‘Fortress’: the arena. But a hospital?”
“The bands I host are energetic. The audience is always violently enthusiastic. Seems only fair to offer to patch-up to my patrons after the event. Fun shouldn’t leave you unable to work the following week.”
“I know a few who’d disagree, but no matter.”
“I bought an army surplus field hospital. The volunteer staff just turned up, almost overnight. This area is rundown, services are scant. Free care for all stabilises the area and makes my enterprise immune to criminal pressure: they like a place that fixes combat wounds without questions.”
“I think your new generation security team might have a little to do with that immunity.”
Crow chuckles: “You could be right. They’re all former assault troopers, the fully enhanced kind. They have difficulty fitting into society. I’ve given ‘em a job where hopped-up lunatics try to kill ‘em every night. The challenge of restraining without killing works off the assault kids violent drives. Keeping the whole place safe from criminals eases their hypervigilance issues. I get top security and they get therapy – it’s a win-win situation.”
“It’s nice to be part of the audience instead of watching it, I’ll admit.”
“You should come along for the assault trooper family gigs. It’s all acoustic stuff, with throat singing and mad-ass breakdancing. It’s so strenuously peaceful, it’s insane.”
Jonah sighs: “I like the idea. Something new under this tired sun would be nice.”
“Amen to that. So, you want another shot to keep the last of the coffee company?”
“I’d like another coffee to keep the next pair of shots warm.”
Crow waves to the counterman: “Jimmy! Two more coffees, two more shots, and leave the bottle.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 23, 2017 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tzen sat on the third floor of the abandoned building in near darkness. Only those streetlights that remained unbroken filtered light through shattered windows and draped plastic into what was once an active construction site.
The money to be made in this part of the city wasn’t going to be in condos, or retail stores. It was only in drugs, and violence, and death.
From somewhere nearby, voices raised above the wind-noise and the distant traffic. Men were bragging at volume, the smell of narcotic-laced sweat filtered up and through the stink of the city streets into Tzen’s olfactory sensors.
Time to power up and move.
Navigating his way through the construction waste with a grace and agility that belied his bulk, his massive boots made nearly no sound on the dusty concrete. At the open edge of the floor he stopped, surveying the alley below.
Seven men clustered in the shadows between the buildings, jabbering over one another in Quikspeak as they examined the contents of a backpack that lay on the ground between them. Tzen focused and picked out the partial label of a well known medical supply company. They had quantity. Not users then, but traffickers.
And a little girl.
She sat off to one side, back against the wall, head down hugging her knees and rocking gently back and forth, keening.
Tzen noted the slung weapons of the dealers, and gauged the best possible vector for descent, then stepped out from the third floor into space and dropped, a tonne of unwelcome heavy into the party.
He landed with one boot each on the head of two of the closest dealers, driving their skulls down through their own bodies into the pavement. Tzen’s lower extremities telescoped into themselves to absorb the impact, the result being no more sound that the wet squelch of compressing and redistributed flesh.
The remaining men were stunned, drug packages still in hand. They stood immobilized, weapons left slung at their sides, unable to rationalize where their comrades had disappeared to, and how this mechanical monster had replaced them.
Tzen raised both arms, elbows cocked at ninety degree angles and turned his hands in automatically to clear the barrels as a volley of flechettes erupted into the two unfortunate souls in their path. In an instant their torsos were spread across the alleyway beyond, hips and legs crumpling where they stood.
“One, two, three, four,” Tzen grated in the closest approximation of a sing-song voice his hardware would allow, “can I have a couple more?”
The man to Tzen’s left was the first to react, bringing the barrel of his weapon up already firing. A steady stream of shells struck Tzen’s chest-plate at an angle. Tzen turned until the angle of their ricochet intersected with the man on Tzen’s right, sending him staggering gurgling backwards to drop in a heap. Tzen swung an arm in a swift fly motion, catching the gunman under the chin and knocking him off his feet with an audible crack as his spine dislocated from his skull.
The remaining man ran screaming, the bag and the drugs forgotten at Tzen’s feet.
It would do well to have stories told of the monster in the darkness. Fear is a more effective deterrent than even violence.
As he collected the drugs from the ground, the soft sobbing sounds bubbled up to the forefront of his attention, and he turned and lumbered over to where the girl sat, still curled in a ball but eyes now wide and watching him.
He reached out an armored hand slowly, and she considered the blood-spattered monster who stood before her, and the apparent gentleness of what had only moments ago dealt death without hesitation.
“Come, little one. Let’s get you home.”
The girl reached out and let Tzen pick her up and cradle her into the crook of one arm.
As they trudged out of the alley into the night, he remembered carrying his daughter home like this, in another time, in another body.
by submission | Jan 22, 2017 | Story |
Author : Mark Thomas
It was a self-destructive spasm of madness!
When the hunter cornered it, The Future had assumed the guise of a malnourished, homeless psychotic, bumping his shopping cart full of human trifles along a dirt path underneath a highway overpass. In this iteration, the Future was utterly defenseless yet it made no attempt at disguise. In fact, it was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with white block letters that unambiguously said: “The Future.”
“Stop!” the hunter commanded, leveling his rifle at the thing.
“I can’t,” The Future replied as it continued to force the wire cart through a network of hardened mud ruts.
The hunter fired a single shot into the ground underneath the nose of the shopping cart. Clods of earth spattered a nearby patch of weeds and a wheel spun madly for a few seconds before dropping onto the path.
The Future glanced nervously at the mutilated cart. “Well,” it reconsidered, “I guess I could pause for a minute.” But the abstraction in the black T-shirt soon fidgeted awkwardly and slowly squatted down to pick up a cigarette package which happened to be lying near its feet. “I can’t stop moving altogether,” it said apologetically. The scrap of cardboard was slowly placed in the basket.
The hunter nodded but his muzzle tip produced little air drawn patterns in response to every movement. The hunter didn’t trust The Future.
The Future was full of tricks.
The ragged manifestation squatted once again and picked up a plastic hand lotion bottle. The hunter’s rifle tracked each movement but didn’t fire. Emboldened, the Future decided to gather a few farther-flung bits of debris while it bargained for its continued existence. “What is it you want?” The Future timidly asked, although it surely must have known.
Fingers deftly extracted a wadded donut shop napkin from some nettles, then a cracked plastic lighter.
“You’re a threat to my investment,” the hunter answered. His cheek was still pressed against the breech. “I’m using a second lab-cultured liver. All of my long bones have been replaced with titanium rods. My viscera is silicon mesh, my memories are coded within magnetic bubbles.”
A dirty breeze wafted through the bridge pilings. “It sounds like you don’t need me,” The Future said sadly as it picked up a dented can of strawberry meal replacement.
“That was the plan,” the hunter said. “But I’ve been informed of a glitch within the process of live tissue synthesis…”
“Ahhh,” The Future said knowingly.
“My humanity is at stake.”
“I’m surprised you consider that a problem,” The Future sniffed.
The hunter’s eye discs became threateningly opaque. There was a small click as the guidance mechanism of his weapon locked onto target.
The Future licked its thin lips. “All existence is a delicate negotiation…”
The weapon exploded and The Future jerked violently backwards into his cart, spilling its contents onto the path. The hunter walked over to the body husk and poked it with the toe of his boot. The abstraction gurgled, but its adopted face soon became peaceful. Perhaps The Future was tired of dragging eternity to and fro.
The hunter meant to leave quickly but was distracted by a gaudy bit of tin near the shopping cart. The pseudo-human picked up a can of OldWest tobacco featuring a colorful prairie scene with a mounted cowboy slumped in front of a frozen sunset. Pink-tipped grassland offered endless tranquility.
The hunter picked up a scrap of notepaper veined with faint purple lines. The pattern was beautifully meaningless.
“Hmmm,” the hunter said and stooped again to retrieve another bright fragment from the endless pile.
by submission | Jan 21, 2017 | Story |
Author : Rory O Reilly
The blue was bright beyond measure shooting far out from the supernova displaying a beauty across the void. The vast ship passed within viewing range, the shimmering metal reflecting strongly. To the stern lay the bridge resplendent in decadent materials and there stood the captain and pilot desperately searching the area with both eyes and advanced scanners. Everything returned negative results from the blank screens to watered eyes. In deep space a distress beacon had been activated several months earlier, a class three dreadnought on routine patrol with over two hundred souls on board. Contact had been lost after the crew reported distortions in magnetic fields and severe damage to the outer hull. The rescue effort had been swift but unrewarding, however back on board the bridge, a piercing siren announced the possibility of better news. A large shape was visible on the scanner, a mass spread out over an almost impossible distance. The captain gave the order to make for the location.
It took several anxious hours to reach the spot and when they did sadness filled the crew’s hearts as they appeared to be the first to discover the ill fated dreadnought which it seemed had been ripped to pieces and now was nothing more than an immense floating graveyard.
The charged particles of the supernova cast an eerie glow behind the hulking debris field.
It was with an uneasy feeling in the captains’ stomach that it dawned on him what had occurred, he shouted the order to turn the ship and place the engines on full power. In the ensuing frenetic rush of activity, strange noises echoed through the craft; the sound of metal contorting and snapping as the pilot desperately tried to get the thrusters to respond. The visor section of the bridge began to crack, the violent arcing of dancing spiderwebs as the sheet weakened to breaking point. With a final explosion the reinforced material gave way and sucked both the pilot and captain into oblivion. With no one left to pilot, the huge ship continued to be torn apart, vast sections torn off as the remaining crew members breathed their last. As the rescue ship neared the end of its existence, its automated distress beacon was initiated and began its deathly symphony with its cosmological brother.
The debris was quickly melded into that of the dreadnought, increasing the radar blip to nearly twice its size. It was here in the vicinity of the beautiful galactic cloud and dense spinning pulsar that these two great ships became one and sat in silence for thousands of years. News travelled and the tale of the missing ships passed into legend until one day a nearby corvette class craft picked up what sounded like two extremely low pings of distress beacons off in the distance and a blip on their scanner.
The merchant captain with surprise in his eyes turned to his pilot and coughed out the order.
“Make way for that point at full speed”.
by submission | Jan 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Russell Bert Waters
Amah had always held her close and sang to her.
She always felt secure in Amah’s arms.
She didn’t want this to become a memory.
The winds shrieked fiercely one night as Amah was taken from her; taken from them all.
She was told to hide, and it was the hardest command she ever obeyed.
Amah screamed.
She could hear the thuds of a struggle, muffled screams, more thudding, then nothing.
The wind grew louder, leading her to believe Amah’s captors had left the hatch ajar.
She had seen these beings before.
They wore odd garments to protect them from the ice and cold.
She had seen their brutality, and overheard tales in hushed tones that she wasn’t supposed to hear; tales of entire families, sometimes entire neighborhoods, disappearing.
She heard tales of perpetually burning pits, stoked with bodies.
Pits with laughing invaders standing around them, wearing those queer outfits.
Amah was with these beings now; her sweet Amah who sang to her.
“The moons, dear child, will be your guide
Into the arms of sleep you’ll glide
Forever in my warm embrace
Forever safe, and full of grace
Sleep, dear child
Rest your head
Sleep, dear child
In your cozy bed”
Amah’s voice was a flower blossoming in her ears.
She was young, and would likely fail, but she would not forsake Amah by not trying something, anything, to bring her back from these callous beings who lacked compassion.
The winds were always howling, a product of the machines that had begun littering the landscape after these beings arrived.
The atmosphere was adjusting to major changes, and it was hard to sleep, to talk, to think.
Amah would soothe her, and sing to her, and, in those moments, there was no wind, there were no
disappearances, there was only the sweet face of her mother, her sweet song in the air.
She stood now, looking down from an icy outcropping of rocks.
Below her was one of those damnable machines, and, a ways from that, one of the domed settlements that had cropped up seemingly overnight all over Europa.
This was a rare night, in that she could clearly see Jupiter looming large in the distance.
The sun she shared with the homeland of her invaders was small and distant, but tonight everything lined up just right to where she could clearly see the path she would take to free her Amah; or die trying.
She could hear voices below, and she could see the trailer that likely contained Amah, and many others, approaching a large hangar.
The knife her father had given her, that he had created out of sharpened rock, sinew, and bones from one of the large, flightless, birds that lived in the hills, was steady in her hand.
She knew the terrain blindfolded.
She could weather the cold without the aid of insulated garments.
The howling winds would help her with the element of surprise.
Succeed or fail, she would hear Amah’s voice once more.
“The moons, dear child, will be your guide” she sang softly to herself, feeling courage wash over her.
She began her swift and graceful descent, hopping from rock to rock.
She came upon the first sentry, plunging her father’s knife into him before he even knew he wasn’t
alone.
“Into the arms of sleep, you’ll glide” she continued singing.
Her stride never slowed as she approached the hangar bay.
