by submission | Nov 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alexander Polkki
The sales associate places the tablet in front of me. She delicately sets her nails on the screen and it comes to life, brimming with imagery, with iconography. We are living the revolution. She’s waiting for me to say something. My silence challenges her.
She reaches under the counter. Brings out a smaller tablet, stands it up. Touching the screen, the same icons brim to life. I want to say it’s like the travel size version of a chess set, but then I remember what chess was like, concentrating on small, plasticized pieces in the car. Thinking moves ahead while trees and old barns breeze by. Perhaps one day we’ll stop to take pictures of the places and things that hold meaning for us, but not ever really needing or expecting to.
She’s brought over a monitor. She rotates the tablet and leans it against the larger screen, at an angle. She spins the smaller one, standing it up in front. This new family is waiting. The silence deepens and I can tell she’s starting to wonder why I came in here.
She waves her magician’s hands over the three screens, and they blend, one into the other. She waves her hand again and icons open. Footage of trees and barns flit by across them all. She takes the tablet by two corners, cocks her head as if she’s saying something. She places the chessboard, back-lit, on the glowing counter, and invites me to play.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The controls were familiar to any race that had developed mechanical means to get around on their planet’s surface.
There was an altitude stick, turning/braking pedals, a throttle plus a variety of buttons and dials to let the pilot know how the trip was going.
A year or two of study to get the math and emergency situations covered and there you go. Every single sentient race could become a pilot.
Except one.
Humans are dumb. They routinely disregarded the most important rule.
“Don’t look at the wormhole’s terminus” was written in all of the available languages, pictograms, sensefields, and soundfeeds around the edges of the front viewscreen of the ship.
That singularity that broke the back of the universe’s insistence on rational behaviour was a place where laws of physics broke down. To look at it drove any sentient mind from this universe irretrievably insane.
They went into whatever fetal, litter, or eggsac position their race was familiar with and stared, wide-eyed, for the rest of their soon-to-be-machine-assisted lives.
Every race knew. Peripheral vision was okay to a point. Look around the point, not at it. Avoid the center. Avoid the center. Avoid the center.
Humans. Sigh.
They called it curiousity. Every single human pilot that had attempted a jump had looked at the center of the singularity at some point during the jumps. The jumps are usually only a few hours long.
They’re banned from piloting now. They’re transported in rooms without windows. Universally, they’re looked down on because of this one trait.
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“A one-way ticket to Ganymede, please.”
“You can’t buy a one-way ticket to Ganymede.”
“Why not?”
“Ganymede orbits within Jupiter’s radiation belt. The law says no one can stay on Ganymede longer than six months. Therefore, you need a round-trip ticket.”
“That’s stupid. What if I only had four months to live, and just wanted to die on Ganymede.”
“Then they would use the return ticket to ship your sorry-ass body back to Earth. Now, either buy a round-trip ticket, or step aside so I can help the next person in line.”
“I want you to ask your supervisor.”
“Very well,” sighed the associate. She pressed her index finger against her temple and activated her comm link. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I have a customer here who wants to purchase a one-way ticket to Ganymede… Yes, sir, I told him that, but he still insists. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Okay. He says for a 10% adjustment fee, you can buy a refundable round-trip ticket, and if you don’t use the return half, we’ll refund its cost. Take it, or leave it.”
“Fine.” He placed the scanner over his right eye and completed the sale. Six hours later, he was in a stasis chamber for the three month trip to Ganymede.
After being revived, he collected his cargo and headed to the spaceport’s ship rental counter. He said, “I reserved a compact ship. Steven Schwarz.”
“Yes, Mr. Schwarz. We have it ready. Would you like to upgrade to a utility ship? We are offering a sale today.”
“No thank you. The compact will suit my needs.”
“Okay. When will you be returning it?”
“I want to drop it off somewhere else. How much extra is that?”
“Where do you want to drop it off?”
“Earth.”
“Sir, these ships don’t have the range to reach Earth.”
“No worries, Miss. My doctorate project was to construct a device to generate a localized wormhole to transport me and the ship to near Earth orbit. But the initiation site needs to be close to a powerful gravity well, which is why I have to test it at Jupiter. So, if it works, I want to return the ship to an Earth-based port.”
“Well, I don’t know. Let me check with my boss. She pressed her index finger against her temple and activated her comm link. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I have a customer here who wants to return his rental to Earth… Yes, sir, I told him that… He says he has a worm thingy… Beats me… Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Okay. He says if you can get the ship to Earth, he’ll wave the drop off charge. But you have to purchase the supplemental insurance.”
“Fine.” Schwarz placed the scanner over his right eye and completed the rental agreement.
An hour later, he was staring at Jupiter through the large flight deck viewport. He entered the course, velocity, and wormhole initiation sequence into the ship’s computer and calmly presses the start button. The ship lurched forward and plummeted into Jupiter’s atmosphere. At the precalculated time, the wormhole generator activated. The ship began to tumble. Schwarz held on for dear life. A minute later, the ship appeared in clear space, not too far from the sun. But the sun was red, not yellow. “Computer, perform a spectral analysis of the star in front of the ship.”
“The spectrum identifies the star as Proxima Centauri.”
“Crap. Are there any gas giants orbiting Proxima Centauri?”
“The largest body orbiting Proxima Centauri is one tenth Earth’s mass.”
“Oh dear.”
by submission | Nov 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
They came like mountains in the night. Great behemoths of lumbering shadow that walked with thunderous grace. With beards of moss and fur of grass, they looked down upon the intruders without a hint of malice. Their great round eyes of polished stone showed only apathy as they descended into the valley out of a starlit horizon, striding over the peaks of the mountains in a single breadth.
With the ferocity of a gardener tending to the weeds, the titanic creatures swept aside portable aluminum buildings, flattened tents over their sleeping occupants and hurled their vehicles into the surrounding sea of stumps and unsightly crags; what had once been a lush forest teeming with life only days before.
At a height equal to that of the giants, the world remained relatively quiet. A low booming here and a distant wail there, but the upper night remained stubbornly calm. Far below, however, among their thick splintered feet armored in dark bark; there was complete chaos.
Men screamed as hell fell around them. Screeching metal and shattering glass formed a chorus of discord while the fuel stores erupted into a destructive beat. A handful of the victims managed to gather their weapons, though they proved useless against the colossal assailants.
On the side of camp furthest from the chaos, the USSV Artemis rumbled her engines into their start-up cycle. Her small pale pilot whispered a frantic prayer to his unseen god, light-years away on earth, he thought, and safe from the terrible wrath of these earthen creatures.
Through the Artemis’ exterior cameras he could see an approaching mass of men scurry beneath the ship’s hull and into the safety of her belly. Scientists and mercenaries alike, armed and unarmed, clothed and naked, all fled before the might of quiet giants.
Despite the ship’s natural thrumming and vibrations, the pilot could sense the rhythmic tremors of the approaching behemoths. The quakes were so unnerving that the pilot wanted nothing more than to flee into some dark recess of the ship and leave his job to some other, braver soul. Other pilots had been brought along for the expedition, though all of them had yet to appear on the bridge, and he realized he was too afraid to move regardless. He stayed and monitored the start-up cycle for the next few brief, endless moments.
No sooner did the console light up green across his board, the mercenary captain appeared on the bridge. A thick, aggressive man with a red face.
“We’re clear to fly! Go!” he screamed, sweat and spit dislodging under his jerking movements.
“Are they all on b-b-board?” said the pale pilot.
“As many as we’re going to get! Go! Go!” He flailed his arms upward.
The pilot leaned over the flight console, flipping a lever that retracted the blast-shield from the forward viewport. The curtains rose on the tragic show that had once been their research camp. A heap of aluminum that had once been a field-lab lay against the bow of the ship. The massive stocks of lumber and local fauna they had mined for research had already been completely scattered or flattened.
The USSV Artemis groaned as she left the alien soil, shrugging off the wasted field-lab.
“Faster!” the captain screamed, pointing. “It’s coming!”
The pilot didn’t bother to look, opting to push the engines to their limits.
“No!” the captain cried in anguish.
The pilot looked up then, into the polished stone eye of the beast. A servant of this alien planet’s own Mother Nature, her wrath incarnate. Her thousand-foot, stone justice.
by submission | Nov 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jack Holt
No one knows why the Darkness came back to life that day, but Stron the Peerless was sent to deal with it. There were others who knew the ancient ways of commanding the power of the Darkness, but none had studied them so single-mindedly as Stron.
It was forbidden to use the power of the Darkness, of course. It was too dangerous. Too powerful. So Stron’s obsession brought him only poverty, chastity, and scorn. He was Peerless, for no one cared to be his peer.
Then the Darkness awoke unbidden.
Eight hundred years before, the Darkness had carved a gorge a mile long into the ground. Now Stron passed the point where shattered boulders gave way to slick, glassy stone. He didn’t even look at the words etched in obsidian –every child learned them by heart:
“We came from the Darkness.
“In the Darkness we slept for fifty centuries. We soared through blackest space undreaming, and the Darkness tended to us. It cloaked us. It preserved us. It nourished us. Until we reached a world full of life.
“The Darkness descended upon this world. It thundered through the skies. It gouged the earth. It boiled stone with tongues of flame. And when it ceased, we emerged from the Darkness and conquered this world.
We owe our lives and everything we have to the Darkness. And here, the Darkness now sleeps, as we once did.”
At the end of the gorge lay a labyrinth of metal, and beyond that, the Bridge to the Darkness. No one had been here in centuries, but Stron found his way through it with ease. He had studied every map and chart and historical record ever made about this place, until he had recurring dreams of wandering these pathways looking for… something. In the dreams he knew, but in the morning he could never remember for what, though.
Finally, he reached the Bridge. It was just as he had imagined. His heart raced, but his head felt clear and calm. Time seemed to slow down. He wondered, is that was something the Darkness can do? Then he breathed deep, and carefully enunciated each syllable of the words that even after a lifetime of study he only vaguely understood.
“Computer, emergency shutdown, all systems. Authorization code Romeo Charlie Sierra.”
“Acknowledged.”
Then Stron the Peerless felt his way through the now lightless room to the captain’s chair and spent the happiest moments of his life sitting quietly on the bridge of the once proud Interstellar Colony Ship ICS-3173, “The Darkness”.
by Julian Miles | Nov 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room was smoky with the singed emissions of substances that made tobacco seem like a health supplement. Everyone knew the risks, but when you were fighting the greatest tyranny to ever rule humanity, longevity just didn’t enter the equation.
General Pantoro couldn’t believe what he had heard: “We’re sure about this?”
Intel Captain Lokus smiled: “It’s confirmed, sir. The damn thing has no defensive field generators and no trace of fusion armour.”
Major Ekrofan raised a fist: “Then we should strike against – what did you say Una Galacta had named it?”
Lokus checked his brief before replying: “Torush One.”
Ekrofan laughed: “Bloody silly name.”
All assembled looked to General Pantoro. He pondered for a moment, then nodded decisively: “Let’s take their new toy away. Tell the Antares and the Ceres that they are cleared for nuclear engagement.”
The twin battlecruisers Antares and Ceres approached the near lunar diameter sphere that hung in equidistant orbit between Earth and Mars. They were heavily cloaked and relying on the chaos created by their attack to give them time to escape, accepting the fact that they might have to go down fighting. It was worth the sacrifice. Torush One was an unknown element, silvery-white with sections of mirror-like reflectivity. Una Galacta had noticeably decreased military operations since it had arrived in orbit, probably from some hidden construction facility. Which indicated how overwhelming they thought it would be.
In the smoky room, a communications officer approached the General. He whispered to Pantoro, whose brow creased before he entered a secure comms booth. The conversation he had was short and he exited the booth with a look of terror on his face. He rushed to the main comms board: “Abort the attack! Stand down all combat units! Stop! Just stop!”
Antares fired first. The damn thing was so big, missing was not the issue. Everyone agreed that all the nukes had to land dead centre to rip their way to the heart of it. With a ripple in space, the Ceres appeared and unleashed her payload as well. The ships used every nuke the Resistance could muster.
General Pantoro sat and cried. No one could get a word of sense from him.
Antares and Ceres linked their comms:
“I’ve got nothing on detectors. Not one hostile or any countermeasures against the nukes or us.”
“Confirmed, we seem to have caught them napping.”
“Hang on; I have surface geometry variance from the target.”
“No impacts yet. What’s the cause?”
“Unknown. There’s a dimple forming in the centre.”
“A what?”
“A crater. Right where we’ve targeted. It’s getting deeper and the rate is accelerating.”
“Do you get a bad feeling about this?”
“Yes. Disengage and get the hell out is my instinct.”
“Agreed.”
Torush One flowed into itself, the crater sinking far enough to become a tunnel as the object changed from sphere to torus. The nuclear hopes of the Resistance passed cleanly through the hole, hurtling toward Earth where automated defences destroyed them.
Pantoro looked up, his face ashen: “It’s not their superweapon. It’s an intergalactic arbiter, sent to end the futile war we’re engaged in and the tyranny we fight. Una Galacta will become a benevolent leadership under threat of unstoppable annihilation.”
The room erupted with cries of “Victory!”
The General stood slowly: “No. Una Galacta ceased hostilities and delayed informing us so we would think that Torush One was theirs, make a desperate attempt to destroy it and in so doing, contravene the ceasefire. We will be liquidated for that. Una Galacta regard ‘last man standing’ as an acceptable win.”
