by Clint Wilson | Mar 7, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Just because mankind has invented time travel doesn’t mean we can go traipsing along down through the ages all willy-nilly. Firstly, one may not, under any circumstances, completely materialize into any previous plane of existence at any time whatsoever. Paradox has been proven and if one chooses to reverse then it will be strictly as an observer and an undetected observer at that, spying from the fringe of existence and never any closer.
And due to phase fluctuation one must always traverse dressed in period correct attire in case of temporary accidental fade in; the technology is good but not perfect. I knew all too well the rules, and when it was finally my turn to use the machine, I came prepared in my Victorian era brown tweed suit and bowler hat.
I sat inside the chamber and as the batteries charged up to wormhole penetration strength I rested my hands upon my umbrella walking stick and readied myself for my fantastic journey.
With a flash my surroundings disappeared and I found myself sitting on a bench in the second story of a Victorian mansion. I turned and looked out the multi-paned window to a beautiful garden below, where a horse and carriage were just pulling up to the grand entranceway.
I heard a noise behind me and spun my head quickly to see a well-dressed family appear at the top of the stairs. Even though I knew that I was invisible to their eyes my every nerve froze as I listened to them chat in their mundane and pompous fashion. So and so was rumored to be engaged to such and such. How much money did they have? Were they of proper breeding? I continued to remain motionless while the group came up to the large window and looked out… through me!
Suddenly a voice called from down the stairs and the father grinned and shouted back, “Coming right along Simpson, you don’t have to invite me for a drink twice.” Then they all turned to go.
I found them all so intriguing with their stiff clothes and their plastered down hair. And as they made their way off I stood up from the bench to get a last glimpse of these wonderful historic creatures, long since dead yet so vibrant there before my eyes. And as I did, the young son of the family, a boy of maybe ten or twelve years, turned in his wide brimmed hat and his smartly tied neck ribbon… and he saw me.
For an instant his eyes locked with mine and I knew I had phased in; and just as quickly the super computer back home adjusted my temporal position and I disappeared from the boy’s sight. But in the split second before I blinked out of existence I heard the lad say, “Look mother, a ghost!”
It wasn’t a result they were happy with back home, but still an acceptable cover to avoid paradox nevertheless, one that worked over and over again while they worked out the bugs of the great machine.
I returned back through the wormhole more excited than ever, already planning my next visit should I get the chance, utterly thankful and completely in awe of the brilliant minds of my time.
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 6, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
As the FNG, I was the crew’s gofer. When anyone needed a lackey, I was the guy. But hey, it was the price I was willing to pay to get into space. Today, I was helping the Chief. He needed to replace the Finnegan Pin that couples the ion reactor to the primary bulkhead, and that meant that we also had to stop the ship’s rotation. How awesome is that? Getting paid to work in zero-g. I love my job.
“Okay, Josh,” said the Chief, “go to the maintenance locker and get me a three foot spanner wrench. And make sure that it has a Heisenberg insulator on the handle.”
“Roger, that, Chief,” I replied as I launched myself toward the aft section. After an effortless flight across the 120 foot wide engine room, I snagged the top rung of the safety rail surrounding the upper deck, and pirouetted myself feet first toward the tool lockers, waving to the Chief as I disappeared through the open hatch.
I drifted over to the inventory control terminal and entered the code for the spanner wrench. While I was waiting for the retrieval cart to produce the wrench, the ship’s intruder alarm sounded. I could hear yelling in the distance, and PPKs discharging. I froze for a few minutes, not knowing what to do. I came back to my senses when I heard the Chief arguing with an unfamiliar voice. Gathering my nerve, I peaked around the hatch. There were two pirates roughing up the Chief.
Before we had set off, we had been briefed by the Rangers that pirates were in the sector, and freighters were easy prey, because they knew we would run with less than a half dozen men. I thought about working my way through the vents to get to the Bridge and radio for help, when one of the pirates left the engine room. The lone pirate had his back to me. That’s when I decide to help the Chief first. I grabbed the spanner wrench from the tray, and slowly moved onto the balcony. I launched myself toward the pirate. Like a peregrine falcon, I swooped down on him. With all my strength, I swung the wrench and split his skull with a vicious two-hander, and then tumbled out of control into the reactor fairing. With lightning speed, the Chief grabbed the PPK and rushed to help me get reoriented. “Great work, kid.”
“We need to help the Skipper” I stated.
“Too late, Josh. Those bastards pushed him, Pete, and Gabriel out the airlock. They’re only keeping me alive long enough to restore the gravity.”
“What do we do?”
“I suppose most on them are scouring the ship looking for you. Maybe they left their ship unguarded. Let’s find out.”
When we entered the pirate’s bridge, we found two of them looking out the ports toward the Endeavour. They weren’t expecting a counterattack, so they were easy pickings for the Chief. As I went for the radio, the Chief went back to the docking station. I heard him fire a shot, and then I heard the outer hatch of the pirate’s ship slam shut. When the Chief released the magnetic clamps, the decompression blast from the Endeavour pushed us clear. Looking through the port, I saw three flailing pirates blown into space with the venting atmosphere.
“I blasted their controls,” the Chief explained as he came back to the bridge. “They can’t close the hatch. In ten minutes, they’ll all be sucking vacuum. Ah, nice. Here come two more,” he said with a satisfied smile.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Humans are crazy. This is a long voyage.
I pretend I’m a greedy Noah sometimes. I pretend that I brought two hundred humans and said ‘fuck it’ to the animals.
Transporters have given the human race the ability to flicker from post to post at speeds previously believed to be impossible. Good for us.
However, a human can’t just beam to Alpha Centauri. There needs to be a receiving station there.
There are long-range ships peopled with volunteers like myself that take centuries to reach far-off planets and set up a transporter sender/receiver. Input/Output posts, they’re called, or I.O. towers. Fitting, since the first transporter was invented on Jupiter’s moon Io by the poor, doomed, Doctor Swanson. The one that took a bite out the gas giant, adding an extra eye.
The ship is huge and mostly automated except for us humans. There are two hundred of us. Only one is awake at a time and we work in two-month shifts.
There are astrophysicist and engineering specialists amongst others that have downloaded their brains into A.I. constructs that we can awaken if an emergency arises.
Other than that, we are free to stare out the windows, eat, and just monitor the passing Doppler universe as we skate under the milk-skin thin ice of lightspeed.
Personally, I think us two hundred volunteers with a penchant for loneliness are completely redundant. I mean, if a true emergency happened at these speeds, we’d wink out of the universe in a flurry of greasy atoms and be none the wiser. We wouldn’t know what hit us.
I think we’re included as lucky charms. We’re the prize in the cereal box. The drive to include humans on the ships is verging on nostalgia. It’s inconceivable to have a space mission without humans, regardless of how superfluous we are.
But hey, that’s why I signed up. I like the isolation. Sometimes, I turn on the lights in the crew room. 199 full green tubes and one empty one; mine. I’ll walk down the white alley and look into the green tubes. I’ll see my co-workers faces, sleeping in fluid, suspended like they’re falling. I’ve only ever met Jared and Tina, the one who comes before me and the one that comes after me. There’s an hour of overlap. I wake them up, they put me under. It’s brief and we don’t talk.
We’re all the same, picked for our sociopathic natures. We prefer to be alone.
Communications at this speed are nearly impossible. Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll get to where we’re headed and it will already be populated. Like we’ll be regarded as antiques or that day’s curiousity. Maybe there’ll be a parade.
Or maybe it’ll just be a rock system and we won’t be able to find any planets to hook up our terraformers to. We’ll just spend our lives in the spaceship, out of fuel for a return journey, winding down like a handmade clock.
Most likely, everything will go textbook. Computers are hardly ever wrong.
I’m a passenger and I’m happy about it.
by Julian Miles | Mar 4, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The speaker hums as the decoder scans for the encrypted channels that the Chendrin use. I know I shouldn’t give in to this ghoulish need to eavesdrop, but I cannot help myself.
“Seventy-four. Seventy-four. Anything on your sweeps?”
“Negative, command. Nothing except asteroids and bits of the last twenty-nine ships sent to find out what happened.”
The Chendrin are a superior race, when judged by their own opinion. They consider us intergallactic upstarts who should remain within a few AU of Earth until we learn respect for our elders. As you can guess, Earthers didn’t take to that idea. So the Chendrin started interdicting us. Pretty soon, it was a war. Problem is, now they’ve stomped our colonies and fleets, they have to prise us from the little outposts and marauder stations. Not that they have worked out the difference yet.
I run a marauder station. I have a whole asteroid field that spans one of the main supply routes for the battlegroup resident in our solar system. I spent a year setting up after I got here, then the fun started. Since then, the Chendrin armada have not received any letters from home. Or anything at all.
“Command, we’re coming up on the wreck of the Cladrana. It looks like it took a pair of direct hits from something with a half-kilometre diameter impact field.”
“We’re sure the Earthers don’t have pressor field technology. It must be something else.”
That’s right, kiddies. The Cladrana played tag with a pair of asteroids and lost. Time to cause an accident. I press the red button.
“Command, encoded burst transmission just rec-“.
The message fragments as the Cladrana explodes, her drives, armoury and anything else that could go bang wired to do just that.
“Booby trap! Taking evasive action to exit vicinity!”
“High and fast, Seventy-four. Rise above the asteroid field.”
“Obeying.”
That is the last Command will hear from Seventy-four. At flank speed it rises, collecting a terribly advanced thin cable sheathed in stealth wrap. Each end of that cable is firmly attached to a small asteroid. They work out what is going on faster than any so far, then target the asteroids to give them just enough of a push to miss. I watch as maintenance luggers start work on severing the cable.
My turn: I hit the blue button and countermeasures reduce their high tech to ornamental lights for a while. Said while being long enough for the real shipkillers to plow into Seventy-four like a pair of titanic sledgehammers. A pair of 550 metre diameter asteroids with five metres of stealth coatings and a lot of engines will do that.
Oh, that has got to hurt. Seventy-Four just became forty-one and thirty-three.
Threat broken, I release the drones from their hangars deep within another asteroid. They’ll finish up anything that’s warm or beeping then return to base. Meanwhile I can go for a juice pack and a piece of cake, then indulge in a shower and some sleep.
After that, it’s scavenging the pieces of Seventy-four while waiting for the next target or targets. No matter. I have enough traps rigged to take a dozen vessels at once, plus multiple concealed silos to dispense anti-voyeur nastiness against any ships who won’t venture into the asteroid field.
I have every luxury that twenty-five salvaged Chendrin freighters can give me. I have every weapon too. But I also have human ingenuity and no reason to quit. They will lose a fleet for every second it took my family to die when they cracked the domes of Mars.
by submission | Mar 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
There’s an alien in my kitchen, and I’m not quite sure what to do. My wife stands by the stove, humming quietly to herself while chopping away at some vegetables for the stew. My son sits at the table next to the alien, trying to teach it how to play his favorite card game, but I don’t think it understands. Its big, blue head just nods along an awkward imitation of our own mannerisms, its big, dark eyes looking back and forth between my son and the little pieces of paper he’s setting down on the table. Meanwhile, my dog sits curiously at the base of the alien’s chair, sniffing at its dangling feet.
And here I am, standing the doorway, briefcase in hand, with no idea what to make of the situation.
“Honey…” I say, walking slowly and methodically around the outer edge of the kitchen, keeping my distance from the alien. “Tell me again where you found it?”
“I already told you,” she says, still smiling at her chopped vegetables. “He was out in the garden. Poor little thing is all alone and hungry.”
“How can you even KNOW that?” I ask, my strained voice betraying my attempts at remaining calm. “Why is it in our house?”
“He’s hungry,” my wife says again, using her knife and hand to dump the finished vegetables into the pot of hot water on the stove. “I can’t turn away a stranger in need.”
“A stranger in… you can’t… it’s…”
But words really do fail me. My son is now trying desperately to get the alien to play a game of cards with him, grabbing the alien’s four-fingered hands and practically stuffing cards into them. I almost call out for my son not to touch it, but I know it’d be futile. They all seem to think this is perfectly normal.
“Why don’t you sit down and have some soup,” my wife says. “It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
“I… I’m calling the police,” I finally manage to say. “We can’t keep him here. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
“He’s just hungry,” my wife says again in a sing-song voice. “Just have a seat and we can call the police after.”
“No,” I say, more definitively. “I’m calling them now. We don’t know what this thing is or what it could mean to the world. We can’t keep him here.”
Suddenly my wife’s hand shoots out, grabbing my wrist and forcing it down into the counter top with freakish strength.
“No.” she says again, all joy having left her voice. I stare up at her, eyes wide, and watch as she slowly raises the knife over her head. “He’s just hungry.”
Before I get a chance to scream, the knife drives into my chest, piercing my heart and sending blood gurgling into my throat. As my body hits the floor, my family doesn’t move, not even the dog. My body twitches, once, twice, then goes still as the feeling leaves my limbs. Just as my vision starts to fade, I see the alien stand up from its seat at the kitchen table, kneel over my body, and sniff at my blood as it flows steadily from my chest..
“Ah…” a voice says in my head. “A-Positive, just what I needed. I’m really sorry about this, but I was simply famished.”
by submission | Mar 2, 2013 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
It never started here, my dear. We are victims of circumstance.
It started with the fires, with her, as we watched the skyline burn in the middle of terrific night. Standing there on the lake shore, horrified beyond rational thought, among wailing multitudes while the city burned to so much carbonized slag. Her. Standing there next to me, face hammered into masks of sorrow and enchantment, painted with furnace shadows. Beautiful.
We had been left behind. There would be no salvation this time.
Every fear a thread–a final impulse–so I reached out and grasped that hand. Shock smoothed away the horror and I felt my expression mirrored in hers. She looked at me.
Looked at me. I mattered again, just like that.
Cool carboplatinum fingers reticently cradled mine. Marvelous control. “Darwin,” she hiccuped, singed hair whisking around green weeping eyes. Taken aback, I laughed darkly, nodded. I touched her cheek in a fit of fear-crazed need, something to show, for once, that I could be kind. Truly kind. I felt inlays beneath the skin, the reconstructed zygomatic, the carbofiber masseter relaxed under my caress. Recycled.
Someone loved you very much, once. Sent you away. Darwin indeed.
“Just so.” I said, looked up as giants hammered on the sky once more, the wheeling horizon all engulfed in flame. Nauseating vertigo, as if I’d spiral out of her hands and into the stars above. The skies were cracking above us. Spidery cracks heliographed the light of burning cities, peoples, their last stretched long fingers into the night. Flotsam and debris floated beyond the transparent shield, bits of smashed lightships and radiator panels glowing like banked coals.
Nearby stars blink and seconds later, ferromagnetics fireballed into the colony’s canopy at twelve kilometers per second. Each star a ship, each blink another shove toward the precipice.
Soon, I thought, the race between cooking or choking would be over. The lake itself began to burn. Sweat poured down the groove of my back. A breeze touched us, and I welcomed whatever came.
Excisement, the Enemy called it. For the consumption of thought. For the heresy of existence. Another volley battered the canopy and the end came in a single body-crushing tsunami of overpressure.
Decompression is equal parts waiting and celerity. The canopy over the city blew outward in rending silence, like it was sucked up by a giant’s straw. Brilliant tidal waves of debris and mezocyclones of fire fell up into the night before extinguishing. No one screamed, even when the fingers of the breach wrapped ‘round us, fetched us up into the night in greedy handfuls.
Excisement.
I never let go of her hand, even when the light went out in those weeping eyes. And here we are. Here I am. Floating here with her, in the depths. This vast ocean. Drowning. Anoxia is killing me and we’ve only begun to swim! Only these few minutes we’ve known each other. Reefs of transparent alloy float around us, glittering like wet jewels. If only she could see this.
Not even a name! I never told her mine. Better this way… isn’t it?
“Darwin.” I mouth, feel something like God’s own hand reach down my throat to tear the life away from this husk. Prosthesis spasms to the tune of dying synapses. “Darwin.” Oh. Oh, I am so sorry. Always so stupid, so awful, never thinking about others. Choking.
That’s her name. Her na–
