by Julian Miles | Aug 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The panoramic window that occupies the longest wall of the executive office at the top of the Vimentane Tower shows a breathtaking view of the nighttime traffic in LEO over London. Against the curved inner wall, a buffet has been laid out ready for the next delegation.
A door in that wall opens a little way, hits one of the tables laden with seafood, and closes. Parker Lenting looks up at the sound of it closing. He permits himself a little frown. Sure enough, a few minutes later the main doors to the office open. Technical Analyst Howerd Banton has rushed halfway down the room before it shuts.
“Director Lenting, I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”
Parker smiles at him.
“I’ve been ignoring you.”
Howerd doesn’t even pause.
“The Carminshan contract cannot be signed!” He slaps a datapad down on the desk and points to it.
Parker sees several sections have been highlighted. His smile disappears.
“And that’s why I’ve been ignoring you.”
Howerd stalls.
“What?”
“The quantities aren’t incorrect, Mister Banton.”
That sets him off again. His eyes widen.
“Quantities? I haven’t even looked at them. It’s the thirty-coil Gauss cannons and the cluster munitions with depleted uranium payloads. Both are embargoed under Tycho Treaty. Also, the penalties for shipping Gauss weapons outside Terra Sector Zero are punitive.”
Parker stops idly tapping at his keypad. Steepling his fingers, he gazes at Howerd until the man starts to fidget.
“What do you think we do here, Mister Banton?”
Howerd gives the question serious consideration before replying.
“I thought we were supplying licensed military equipment to Galactic Forces across the Terra Sectors. However, having seen and compared the summaries of the Magdubor, Xhintyl, and Lordintum contracts to the Carminshan one, I can only conclude we are, for want of a better term, supplying illegal weaponry to intergalactic organisations, some of them quite likely criminal in nature. It’s beyond my comprehension how much suffering we have enabled, and also the reasons why elude me, as I can find no trace of profiteering.”
Parker raises a hand for silence.
“Let me provide some context. When humanity first blundered across alien races some 115 years ago, we quickly learned that we were the new kids among an astonishingly old and long-established galactic empire. We were also considered primitives, having managed to enter our interstellar phase while retaining tribal drives. The fact we still fought wars over territories, resources, and religions was not well received out among the stars. Steps were taken to prevent us causing trouble. Somewhere around that time, a galactic criminal organisation noticed we made really effective guns and bombs. Indeed, we’d taken personal and planet-bound weapons technology far beyond that developed by other races.”
Parker pauses to take a drink before continuing.
“So they approached several Earth governments with an offer we quite literally couldn’t refuse.”
Howerd leans forward.
“Which was?”
“Those ‘steps to prevent us causing trouble’? It means exterminating humanity and turning Earth into a farm planet. The only reason we’re still here is because of those illegal weapons, which we supply at cost or for free.”
He waits for Howerd to draw the obvious conclusion. When that doesn’t happen, he sighs, then continues, voice coarse with anger.
“We do that because the moment we’re no longer useful to their organisation, our protection vanishes, and we’re all fertiliser within a month.”
Parker glares at Howerd.
“Any questions?”
He considers for a moment, then steps back.
“I’ll ensure the Carminshan contract is checked and ready for them, Director Lenting.”
“Thank you, Mister Banton.”
by submission | Aug 25, 2024 | Story |
Author: T.A. Gruver
The rolling thunder of pulse cannons fell silent as the setting sun hid behind the clouds dancing over Eleos Basin. Not a sound could be heard from the firing lines as a crying Orion trooper grasped his leg with one hand and pulled himself up with the other through the red sands to the Andromedan firing line. Inch by inch, Private Ollie Doolittle crawled to the enemy, his beam rifle slung around his back. He wondered why he didn’t see theirs lighting up the sky.
He heard the faintest hum of a railgun coming to life over his headset seconds before he spotted a flash from the corner of his eye that sent him to the ground. The pain shot up his spine and bore into his brain—what little there was of it. Ollie thought about what his brothers were thinking, watching good ‘ole Private “Do Nothing” walking on all fours like a newborn to his grave. He owed them one last laugh for leaping over the parapet, abandoning his post for fame on the HoloNet feeds.
Har Deshur was the fourth dustball from its sun in a forgotten pocket of the Orion Belt where the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies collided. Eons of cold wars evolved into hot wars as Andromeda’s gas-rich stars drifted into human space and the nozzles of its solar rigs. Humanity dug a hole in the Red Planet and dared the Andromedans to follow them. The End of the Anthropocene promised to put on one last fireworks show.
When the Human League made landfall on Har Deshur, their plan was to lose slowly. For the past week, they had done just that. The 181st Spaceborne Division was running short on power packs and people, leaving it to reap clone reservists fresh out of the lab to fill its ranks and defend its reputation as the Hundred-and-Eighty Worst.
Thirty straight days of shelling were enough to drive the brothers of the 181st stir-crazy in their dugout in Eleos Basin. They bided their time eavesdropping on Andromedan communications. It was a week until the Andromedans learned of their unwelcome audience. The hexapods amused themselves, regularly informing the Orion boys how they would go about copulating with their mothers.
Grimacing, Ollie looked up to see someone walking towards him. Their silhouette grew taller as they came closer. It was an Andromedan, clad head to toe in eight feet of titanium, a mess of arms and legs.
Swearing under his breath, Ollie flailed about for his rifle, limping like some hurt animal when four meaty hands lifted him to his feet. He struggled as the Andromedan threw him over its shoulder, carrying him like a rag doll back to the Orion firing line.
The pair were met with stares and silence. No one moved at first. The Andromedan kept its hands where the company could see them. After what seemed like an eternity, the Ollies broke into cheers. Their Andromedan friend was sent off to No Man’s Land with pats on the back and an 181st patch pinned on its sand-caked exo-suit by the Ollie in charge.
The sun shone on the smoldering battlefield as the Andromedan returned to its post. The burst of light sent a charge through both sides’ beam rifles—1%…3%…4%. Shots rang out again.
by submission | Aug 24, 2024 | Story |
Author: Brian C. Mahon
“How hopes and dreams vanish when the Maker decides to lower the curtain,” Clarissa Dochenal, Countess of the Third Tier, chided herself. Even the confines of a Zakiche war-corsair failed to guarantee safety when the gods warred. The Maker, the False Sun, the Void Avatar, the Slaver, and the Half-mortal feuded for the right to galactic dominance, and when the Maker called its blessed followers to battle, the Zakiche answered.
The Third Tier held the devoted responsibility of ensuring the Maker’s will reached the spearpoint driving into the weakening flank of the Half-mortal’s Sagatarum sector stronghold. But an errant outrunner of the Half-Mortal’s vanguard found her first. The explosion propelled a spearpoint made of a splintered crossbeam of one nanosecond-offset Godsteel to pin the countess off her feet to a bulkhead.
An Inker, a chronicler drone, navigated the debris-rife corridor to find her in the control room, to rest a narrow band of light on her shoulder, and it intoned in a flat, electronic voice, “Will you to add to knowledge, Countess?”
She wiped away the rivulet of blood trickling from her mouth. Her mono-suit injected another dose of numbing agents, effective for pain but keeping the countess wholly exposed to mortality’s palpable reality.
“I have,” she said weakly, wiping again, “my last revelation, Inker.”
It floated to meet her eye, vertically panning her stuck form with its thin spotlight. “Please Countess. Go ahead.”
“I learned- ah!” A muscle spasm forced her to lurch along the jagged shaft, and she shrieked out to the Inker, “I learned! The folly!”
The Inker’s robotic eyelid clapped shut, then open. “What is the folly, Countess?”
Countess Dochenal hissed through clenched teeth, “Perception. We see ourselves unique, on a march through time… each generation the master of the world, each, ah, AHH!” She convulsed, and a trio of needle-tipped tentacles whipped from her neckline, stabbed, and retreated. “Each generation euphoric in its exquisite existence, informed by our earliest books to set our species as masters of th- “
She stopped, her hand shaking uncontrollably.
A soft white vaporous halo surrounded the Inker, and its voice, still clear and present among the groans of bending structural beams and tinny alarms, commanded, “Continue, Countess. Death is near.”
“-of, of the world writ large.” She swallowed a bitter mouthful. “We limit our concerns to the framework of our lives. What affects us, how we affect first order contacts, no further.”
The Inker skimmed closer.
“We believe we are… so unique.”
“Already recorded, Countess.”
The flesh loosened a little more, and more the dark stream flowed, taking with it the ease of breath and clarity of mind. “… we never understood our people’s history as a singular event. In the gods’ wars, we perceived… ourselves elevated servants, special avatars of our lord’s faith… and fury, against enemy deities and their idolaters.” Her lips slacked as she bowed her head, smeared red in crimson flashing lights.
“Countess Dochenal. You must continue.”
A tremble set into her weakened voice, but she went on, “Our entire history is… an indiscernible moment to the gods, and our generations… slivers of their panorama. We incorrectly relish our importance, misunderstand our meaning in the universe. Short-sighted… we refuse the landscape. We are… a calculated move in the Maker’s plan… the evolution of life from microbes to us star farers… our world, not a special miracle flouting universal constants, no, it is… engineered, one move on the board. Ascendancy? Anthropocentric… foolishness.”
A blue scanning beam crossed her forehead. “You are becoming colder, Countess.”
No hint of recognition twitched across her lips or in her eyes. “To gods, what is a planet, a world? A thought, instantaneous and forgettable. If… if the universe is alive, we its sentient thoughts, ephemeral synaptic… firings… then we, Inker… we serve emotions… at war.”
Countess Clarissa Dochenal’s chin lowered, and the image of sanguine life trickling from her tattered mono-suit was the last her quieting mind took in, as she grew still among undulating hazard lights and acrid air. The Inker, alone, glided through the haze and debris to find a chronicler jettison tube and make course for Zakiche, a long journey, but one it was designed and burdened to make. In the Maker’s Compendium, the timeless library, the drone will pen her final rebuke in the undying records so that the countess may see eternity.
by submission | Aug 23, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The toy soldier guarded the corner of the commander’s makeshift field desk. The faded tin sentry with chipped red jacket, high peaked cap and bent bayonet stood upon the order.
Especially in the age of cyberwar, such an order was on paper. Hand written. Delivered by flesh and blood. A reminder of what was real and what was to be spilled.
The commander concentrated on the little toy. Its eyes fixed and sure. A plaything of the past, a steadfast harbinger of battles to come. War made fast in the hands of children. It changed little. An order given. Received. A decision needed. A sacrifice demanded.
His tactical screens displayed the grids under current assault. A counterassault had been ordered: a hype and wipe. Jacking systems beyond their breaking points, then a massive takedown of security redundancies and fail-safes.
Homes, hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure and industrial sites would implode, explode. Many would suffer.
Though not the commander. Not his soldiers.
What were soldiers anymore?
In cyberwar there was only the enemy. The other side. Imaginary lines within which the ordinary comforts of modern life—all manner of integrated systems, machinery, devices, appliances, transport—were turned against any and all. Faces pressed into pillows or pushed out windows. Silent and fraught.
That was the commander’s charge: take it down, take them down.
Them.
He imagined them. No different than himself. So much like the teenage daughter he’d lost to them. A casualty of an attack intended to jack fleets of spy-and-die drones. High on a mountain pass in winter, her autonomobile’s systems were collaterally blitzed. Her vehicle accelerated wildly and plunged into a deep ravine. Lost in snow and ice, she froze. He did not know how slowly.
He picked up the toy soldier from his desk, from atop the order. He held it lightly in his bare hand. Felt the chill of metal. A shiver of recognition.
The commander gave his command. There might have been other ways, but he did not know them. There might have been some who did not need to pay, but he did not owe them.
He put the toy soldier back in place. Upon the desk. Atop the order. In the middle of war unlike any other. Still child’s play.
by submission | Aug 22, 2024 | Story |
Author: Philip G Hostetler
The project began as deep space exploration. All that was found was uninhabitable, far flung planetoids and asteroids, space, and more space. And finally, the edge of space, that was the most salient discovery we made and a puzzling phenomena. We found that space was moving into a metaphysical oblivion, that space was a material of sorts, a thing in and of itself. We started sending probe drones into that metaphysical oblivion. We programmed them with coordinates to return and land on earth if they were to survive… whatever lay beyond the universe.
None of the probe drones returned, it least not in the way we expected. When we sent them through they immedietely registered as though they’d already returned to earth. ‘Had to be a malfunction’, we thought…
Then Dr. Niard suggested something totally absurd. If they’d already arrived on earth, why not look for them here? In fact, why not look for them at the Research, Launch and Logistics center we worked at every day.
“What like in the drone hangars? Or the supply rooms? They’re lightyears away, how could they be here?”, I said,
“No”, he said,
“Underground. Buried.” A few eyebrows raised, bewildered expressions were hard to hide, but he was insistent that we at least give it a shot.
So we contacted the local university’s archeology department, asking them to do a deep metal detection for a specific type of alloy used in the construction of the probe drones, Erisium, an alloy that was truly immune to corrosion and entropy. They inquired as to why and Dr. Niard replied,
“Honestly, the less you know, the better.”
Much to our surprise and, apparently, Dr. Niard’s chagrin, the archeological team detected Erisium buried just outside the Research, Launch and Logistics center’s foundation. They began digging and a day later dug up the first drone probe we’d sent through, affectionately named “Helldiver-1”
We all turned to Dr. Niard, looking for some explanation.
Dr. Niard shook his head grimly,
“I’ve always carried a sort of delusional paranoia with me, that maybe, just maybe, I’ve been myself before. That moments of stark deja vu are actually recollections of an elementary similarity of a time I’d been myself before…”
“Uh… what?!”
“Don’t you see? The drone probe we sent through that metaphysical abyss, that unknowable emptiness, we sent it one, or many universes’ ago, and it recycled into a new universe. The Erisium enabled the probe to survive the harsh conditions of the early universe and it waited, waited until our solar system formed and familiar landmass developed at its programmed coordinates. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found another Helldiver-1, or multiples of Helldiver-2’s and 3’s.”
It was a horrible implication, that the universe, reality as we know it, perpetually recycled, and that fate is a very real and terrible possibility.
by submission | Aug 21, 2024 | Story |
Author: Bryan Pastor
Sitting there in a car waiting for my date to come out, it had caught my eye, standing still like the sail of a ship in a dead calm sea, trying to blend with a hedgerow in the dying light of dusk. My eyes were fixed on it, made out the details, like how it flexed its fingers in anxiety of having been spotted. Movement caught my attention, pulled me away for the barest moment and it was off, dashing across the street. I tracked it as it entered a column of light cast by an old mercury vapor lamp, it faded until it was a silvery blur, barely there, then began to rematerialize as it left the blue-green glow, sprinting across a lawn, taking a moment to glance back at me and finally disappearing behind a house.
The shadow became my obsession, even though I would never see it again. I came back to the spot over and over, long after the girl and I called it quits, even after she had moved, and some other family settled in. I came back so many times that the family finally got a restraining order and barred me from coming back. As I grew older, I kept an eye on real estate listings and when the house came to market I pounced on it. Fate foiled me. The day before settlement the house burned down. Months later a developer bought up all the land in the area and turned it into a mall. Some speculated that it was the developer that set the fire, but I know better. The shadow was toying with me.
When the mall came I was excited. The restraining order didn’t hold anymore, but I found that the spot was now in the middle of parking lot, ablaze even in the dead of night under thousand-watt bulbs that no self-respecting shadow would hang around in. Even worse, as I grew older, and the taint of years crept over me compounded by the construction I lost the sense of where the moment happened. Was it there in aisle 21B outside the Orange Julius or over there in 14 J near the salt dump?
It was with a bit of relief that I began to notice the little things recently. My razor blade moved from one side of the sink to the other, the milk carton placed in the cabinet with the cereal, the shed door left open overnight. I know it’s him, I feel him coming closer. All these years I thought I was the one in pursuit.
Maybe shadows hold grudges. All those years ago I caught him where he shouldn’t be. I take some measure of comfort in thinking that he has been as obsessed with me as I have been with him.
I know he is here. I can feel his presence, hear his labored breath mimic mine as I scramble up the steps. But the joke will be on him, I am waiting. I am ready. Make your move and we will see who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
