by submission | Jan 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Andrew DiMatteo
I stared out the viewport at the other ships in the fleet. Contact was infrequent – a few transmissions a year, telemetry exchanges, stuff like that. Never my deal since all I did was water plants all day, but we were a fleet, goddammit. It wasn’t fair for them to leave us behind like this.
The cold hard truth: Our velocities weren’t that different, even now. Nevertheless, they were accelerating at a steady one gee and here we were, adrift and off course. Engines and maneuvering rockets destroyed, leaving us stuck at one third c and going nowhere fast. No shuttles left of our own and no other ship willing to risk hers rescuing a derelict. Why waste resources on something better forgotten?
Every few hours I swear I can see the rest of the fleet pulling away, even though I know it can’t be visible yet. For all I know, it’s the meds. I’ve got the med bay all to myself because technically I was the only one injured – everyone else was either pulped instantly or in stasis. Evidently I was sneaking a nap on the crash couch in the garden supply closet when it happened. I had the stasis field at 2/3 strength. Very relaxing.
The docs that came out of stasis after the accident say I shouldn’t take the bandages off anytime soon. Even with most of its inertia gone, the rack of cutting shears did quite a number on me – especially the one that punctured my skull.
The newly woken crew said it was a miracle that the ship wasn’t simply vaporized on impact. They asked me about trying to get the hydroponics back online in case we can coast someplace. I choked back bitter laughter. I can’t remember my own name, let alone plant nutrient balances, but it doesn’t seem worth it to tell them that. Let them think there’s something to live for. I know better.
The gaps in my memory seem like the view outside. Bright sparks separated by cold uncaring emptiness. I can feel that emptiness growing. I can feel the other ships forgetting us, relegating us to the past as we fall further behind. The docs said my memories would come back slowly, but they’re not. I remember less of myself every hour that passes, and they check on me less frequently now – probably accepting the inevitable themselves.
I’m a damn cautionary tale just like our poor ship: Don’t nap next to gardening shears on an interstellar ark. Don’t get lax on collision avoidance maintenance and hit something while doing a good fraction of the speed of light. Simple really.
I notice that the med bay has stations similar to mine set up. The docs must have been disappointed when it turned out I was the only one not needing to be placed in the recycler. I wheel around and grab any syringe that looks the same as my pain meds – one for each ship still out there.
Back at my viewport the lights grow further and further apart. Memories of the last few days swim by and get added to those already lost. Lesson learned. On to greener gardens.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Harry Morgan was a bear of a man. Over six feet and in excess of 240 pounds. He eschewed a prosthesis, preferring to simply pin up the sleeve of his MCU where his left arm had once hung. He wore the morphic combat uniform of the Confederacy even though it had been three years now since his retirement.
For all his size and the deep scars that crossed his face, he was a gentle man. Slow to anger and much slower still to violence. It is no small wonder then that he lay upon the purple sand beside a methane sea bleeding his life away.
It had been gut shot. A slow painful way to die. He silently cursed the self sealing feature of his suit. A quick rush of his oxygen into the near vacuum of the planets atmosphere would be more merciful than this.
“You bastard,” he said, wincing from the painful effort to speak. “You murdering bastard.”
From a vantage point atop a boulder, further up from the lapping tide, an envirosuited figure stirred. “Now, now, calm yourself or you’ll bleed out faster.”
“Is that your game? You want to watch me suffer slowly? You want to watch me die?”
Casually, the seated figure examined the weapon in his lap before quietly responding. “Die? Now why would I want you to die? Suffer? Yes. Immeasurably. But die? Emphatically, NO. I want you to live. And you shall. You shall bleed to death. When you die, your monitoring system will shut down and within a scant heartbeat you will be frozen through. You suit will activate the beacon and within hours you shall be rescued, resuscitated and resurrected in all of your glory.”
“Why,” he gasped, spraying his visor with blood soaked phlegm.
“So I can do it all over again.”
“But why? Why at all, you crazy fuck?”
“Why? WHY?” The voice took on a disembodied quality as it rose to a banshee shriek. “Why,” he repeated a third time, his voice growing calm once again.
“Why? Because I like you. And Mother liked you. She always liked you best.”
by submission | Jan 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Dan Hope
“Shut it down! SHUT IT DOWN!”
Officer Jepson hovered at a safe distance and watched as the man floated across the landing pad, bobbing up and down, bumping into the guard rail as he slapped frantically at the controls strapped to his forearm. Packs were intentionally hard to turn off–no one wanted to accidentally hit a kill switch while cruising to work at 1000 feet.
“Probably just turned legal and thought he could handle a pack,” Jepson thought. “The new ones are always shaky.”
“Shut it down, sir, or I’ll be forced to assume you’re hostile,” Jepson shouted over the roar of his pack. He wouldn’t, but it was nice to see the new guys squirm.
The unfortunate jumper managed to navigate through the shutdown menu and dropped the last three inches onto the platform. He wasn’t ready to support his weight; his legs buckled and he fell back on his rear, fuel tank clattering on the metal deck.
Jepson swooped in and landed gently on his toes. He tapped out the shutdown sequence from memory without taking his eyes off the man. A few other jumpers gawked as they streamed by on their commute home to backyard landing pads.
“Is everything alright, sir?” Jepson strolled over as the man picked himself up.
“Y-yes officer,” he stammered.
“Where you headed tonight, Mr…” Jepson waited through the awkward silence until the man realized Jepson was looking for a name.
“Oh, uh, it’s Thomson. I’m heading home. Just, um, getting used to this pack. Just got it.”
“Good for you. License and registration, please.”
Thomson’s shaking fingers reached for his display and tapped out the commands to transfer files to Jepson.
“Have any idea how fast you were going?”
Thomson’s head shot up. “Well, uh, I hadn’t checked my airspeed for a few miles officer, but, um, I don’t think I was going over 150.”
Jepson paused longer than needed. “You were going 148.” Thomson let out a sigh of relief.
“You been doing preflight before using your pack? You wouldn’t believe what happens to people. Just had to help clean up a wreck yesterday. Guy’s right thruster failed and the left kept firing. He did some pretty cartwheels right into the 37th floor of the Glandon building.
Jepson suppressed a smile as Thomson’s eyes grew wide.
“You wouldn’t happen to be jumping under the influence, would you Mr. Thomson?”
“No sir, absolutely not!” Thomson blurted.
“You just never know who’s had too much to drink up there. Last week some guy drifted out of the designated flight lane and crashed head-on into some poor commuter. We didn’t even find all the body parts, let alone pieces of their packs.”
Jepson watched Thomson take a nervous glance up at the jumpers scudding by in the afterburner lane. He allowed for another long pause while he stared Thomson down.
Finally, Thomson asked, “D-d-did I do anything wrong, officer?”
Thomson jumped as Jepson barked, “I don’t like jumpers who endanger others, Mr. Thomson. Do you honestly want to pretend you don’t know what you’ve done?”
Jepson leaned in close. Thomson’s pack rattled from his trembling.
“Your bottom left landing indicator light is burned out. Who knows if other jumpers would have seen the right-hand one. Someone could have gotten hurt.” Jepson tapped at his forearm and the display beeped. “I’ve sent out the citation. You be safe, sir.”
Jepson took off, leaving Thomson to collapse onto the platform. Jepson finally permitted himself a smile.
“The new ones are always the most fun.”
by Duncan Shields | Jan 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The control harness turned blue a second before I knew we were going to be hit. I pressed up against the back of the transport in a futile simian effort to get as far away from the pain as possible. The light outside the windows went nuclear. God’s donkey kicked us in the side of the head. In a lighting-flash world of white, I blacked out.
I woke up a few seconds later. We were a submarine in an ocean of fire. Our craft was in a flatspin in the top third of a mushroom cloud. We were a black dot in a great orange lake of fiery death. We were a tadpole in the heart of a manmade sun. The pilots were screaming. I looked across to my fellow dropouts. Their smiles echoed my own.
Everything was going according to plan.
I stood up and kept my balance. My men did as well. Our suits were too bulky for salutes but they stood still, waiting to follow my lead. The plane kept spinning. The eight of us stood there swaying a little like we were on the deck of a boat. The pilots had stopped screaming. They were probably dead.
I nodded and walked forward. My giant boots clunked on the grates like one-ton magnetic dragon feet. I put my gloved hand on the hot peeling paint of the door release handle. I counted to three loudly in my helmet. The men tensed.
I pulled the handle.
Hell was let into the cigar-tube body of the plane. It was too much stress for the vehicle. It flew apart. In pieces, its molecular integrity couldn’t take the heat and it turned to dust. The pilots were incinerated.
We dropped like rocks. We dropped like spiders. We freefell through thick plasmic radiated atomic hellfire. The displays on our face shields showed us where we were in relation to the others and the ground. The ground was coming up quick.
One of my men starting twitching. His face shield had a flaw in the monocrystal. It cracked. One second later, it was like he never existed.
We hit the ground feet first with no chutes like God’s hammers. Five thunderous beats. Five men in the middle of the worst that science had to offer. We were standing at the center of the crater. We were standing in the bottom of a bowl of red heat. We were standing at the eye of the hurricane. It was a vacuum here surrounded by billowing upward swinging curtains of smoke and flame like a Bedouin’s bedchamber. We stood in silence. We stood equidistant like the points of a pentagram in position around it.
The arrival. There was a fifteen-dimensional diamond floating in the center of our formation. It was aware of us.
We primed our weapons. We were going to nip this in the bud.
by submission | Jan 18, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
If I hadn’t made the tran-atomics strike, we couldn’t have afforded the cottage in Coventry. If we couldn’t afford the cottage, we wouldn’t have been docked during the strike. If we hadn’t been docked during the strike, we would have waited to start our family. If we had waited, we would have been destroyed with the rest of Earth Force. So the birth of my daughter saved the rest of my family.
We watched the feeds as the invaders swept aside the efforts of the belters. Our friends and neighbors died two for every one they destroyed, and there was nothing we could do. Time and again, I caught myself about to leave for my singleship to help. Then I would remember that I had rented it to a friend, and I had no way to defend us.
We watched as the invaders came within range of Earth’s primary defenses, and for once were glad that they had been so paranoid of us belters. And we cried when we saw that it wasn’t enough.
The invaders died by the thousands, yet again, but they had enough left to bombard the home planet. Even our simple scopes here in the belt could see the flashes of death on her surface. And still they fought. Missiles left from an unsought war a hundred years ago lifted slowly and locked on to anything in Near Earth Orbit. By then the only things left in that orbit were invaders, and as slow as the missiles were, more invaders died.
I supposed they knew they couldn’t win.
The few hundred invaders that were left turned to flee the system. As they flowed outward along the path of destruction they had wrought, they seemed to have forgotten the rest of the belters on the far side of the system. Weeks had passed and every ship capable waited for them. No invader left the Solar System.
That was a decade ago. Ten years at near light speeds. I know that we learned how to reach these speeds by studying the wreckage of the invaders, but it doesn’t matter. They came for us out of the black, and that is how we will come for them.
Ten years for me, nineteen for you. Daughter, this is why your father had to leave. You saved us once, and now it’s my turn.
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“We know that you released the Vigilante Spheres, Dr. Vehmic. So, you might as well confess,” argued the investigator.
Dr. Vehmic leaned back in his chair and smiled. Yes, he did release the spheres, but they couldn’t prove it. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” he replied.
“Quit playing games, Doctor. We have a copy of your thesis from ’16. We know that you theorized building autonomous devices with unlimited range that can fly, hover, and kill.”
Dr. Vehmic waved his hand dismissively. “That was mere speculation on the part of an ambitious young graduate student looking for employment in the defense industry. Nothing ever came of it.”
“That’s not what Dr. Curtis told us.”
Oh crap, thought Vehmic, but he kept his composure. “Who’s he?”
The investigator picked up a folder and opened it. “Dr. Timothy Curtis, a famous neuroscientist. I’m surprised that you haven’t heard of him, since we have video of the two of you together. It seems that he has developed the technology to decipher the syntax and the semantics of neural language. He can read minds, in other words. And he incorporated that technology into your automatons.”
“To what end,” demanded Vehmic?
“Here’s what I think,” began the investigator. “Ever since your wife and son were killed by Islamic terrorists, you’ve been plotting revenge. But deep down, you’re a decent man, unable to kill just any Muslim. You’re only after the really bad ones. So, you created these ‘Vigilante Spheres’ as they’ve come to be known, and released thousands of them in the Arabian Peninsula. They’re programmed to scan the brains of random individuals. If they detect that the individual is a terrorist, or fundamental Islamic extremist, it exposes them to a lethal dose of hard radiation. They get sick, and die a horrible death. Your devices have killed thousands already, and they are spreading to other parts of the world. Unfortunately, Dr. Vehmic, whatever your ‘execution criterion’ was, it wasn’t specific enough. Your devices are killing more than just Islamic terrorists. It appears that they’re killing anybody that meets your definition of ‘evil.’ In the last month, that list includes mercenaries, drug dealers, military commanders, world leaders, even some murderers who were already safely locked away in prison. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor, they were all bad actors, to be sure, but the U.S. Government can’t have its citizens killing foreign dignitaries, even if they are murderers. Now, Dr. Vehmic, you to tell us how to deactivate these devises.”
Still defiant, Vehmic replied. “Sorry Inspector, you’ve got the wrong man.”
“We’ll see,” said the inspector as he lifted a metal box onto the table. “I have a theory, Doctor. I don’t believe that your programming differentiates between individuals that kill for ideological reasons, from those that kill simply because they are “evil”. So, has your quest for revenge blackened your soul? Has blind hatred turned you into an evil person?”
The inspector began unlatching the metal clamps securing the lid of the box. “Now, I estimate that in the last year, you are personally responsible for killing at least ten thousand people with your spheres. Oh, by the way,” he added, “we captured one of them, and I happen to have it right here.” He patted the top of the box. “So, Dr. Vehmic, will you tell us how to deactivate the spheres, or should I let this one out of the box? I’d really like to know if my theory is correct. What do you think, Doctor? Will one of your spheres consider you an ‘evil’ person?”
