by submission | Dec 26, 2011 | Story |
Author : Chris Daly
The dust was unbearable. Dry, grey, clinging powder draped over every surface, clogging the machinery, grinding against gears and wheels. Water refused to wash away the dirt, forming only a cloying mud that was just as abrasive. His hands bled, crisp and chafed. He had no gloves, no protection from the work that consumed his effort.
‘Clean-up’, they called it. He installed the engines that probed the ground, searching for deep, buried water, enough to wash all this filth away. The dust was all that remained of a civilisation that once dwelled here, cities and towns incinerated away. First came the embers, smoke and ash, later the rubble broke down into that dust, surrounding and coating everything. He worked tirelessly, checking gauges, replacing worn cogs, lubricating the gearboxes, as the machine drilled deeper, through asphalt, dirt and bedrock.
He looked up at the brown sky, past the great towers and twisted metal girders, watching the light straining against the permanent cloud cover. One day, he knew, his work could clear that sky. He would clear away the grey blanket smothering his world. Each passing year, fewer and fewer of his kind searched for that dream. Occasionally, a small pocket of moisture would be found, enough to keep some of them going, but so much was trapped in those clouds, refusing to fall, and the rest entombed in aquifers deep under the old lakes, rivers and mountains. Almost every week now one of them fell, sharing their water with the rest. The algae and fungus in the waste pits kept them alive, but it was bare sustenance, not the abundance that the ancestors had enjoyed.
Even with that abundance, they destroyed each other. Now their offspring fought like pack animals, scavengers over what was left around them. He could never understand why the old ones did it; the others told him not to try. ‘Keep drilling’, they said, ‘One day you’ll bring back what once was.’
The machine let out a whine, cable and wire straining, snapping over bare metal. An acrid cloud rose up, the smoke from a burning motor. He coughed, then sat back and sighed, face in his cracked hands. A tear crept into his eye, traced its line down his face, darkening the grey dust he constantly wore. He sat up again, wiped his nose with his tough sleeve. Useless to cry, he told himself, it just wastes the water. He lifted a rusted tool from the floor, set down his rifle, and returned to work.
One day, he thought. One day soon.
by submission | Dec 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
“Jack! Come in here a minute!”
“All right Mary, what is it?”
“Check this out. I was running down that noise on the comms channel, but it wasn’t noise. Listen.”
Mary touched one of the controls in front of her, and a crackling voice erupted from the starboard communications station.
“…the best friend I ever had, closer than my actual brothers, far better to me than I ever was to him. I spent a hundred nights…”
She turned it off.
“It’s an old radio signal from Sol! It must have mixed with one of the local oscillators and gotten upconverted into our comms band! It has to be a thousand years old!”
“If it was original and that old, we would never have gotten it at all. You have the whole message?”
“Sure, it cycled at least twenty times, that’s why it’s so clear – I was able to stack the repeats and drive the signal above the background. Want a hardcopy?”
“No, just copy it to a thumb, but… there’s a tradition. After you copy it, re-record the message in your own voice. Loop it a hundred times or so, then transmit it on the directionals. Send it back to Earth, and maybe twenty of your other favorite directions. Pick places people might catch it, other than that it doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, what frequency?”
“Same as the original signal – if you send it on the comms channels we’ll get flagged, but no one cares what goes out at radio frequency. Besides, as strange as it may sound, that mixing wasn’t accidental – it’s not in the specs, but these rigs are designed to catch signals like this one.”
“Why?”
“I told you – tradition. Get to it.”
“Jack, why my voice, why not the original?”
“It will be clearer than the one you received. Besides, the voice doesn’t matter, just the message. Meet me in the wardroom when you’re done.”
The wardroom was filled to capacity when Mary finally reached it. The entire comms staff was there, along with most of the older crew and a few others. Jack took the portable drive from her hand and replaced it with a glass of brandy before playing the recording to the crowd. For several minutes, the room was silent save for one scratchy voice, telling of a friend, a brother, a son. When it finally fell into static, Jack raised his glass and cleared his throat.
“Friends, tonight we heard a voice in the dark. The speaker is forgotten, but the message goes on, and we honor it. Raise a glass tonight to Jeremy Coonradt. He is not dead while his name is still spoken. To Jeremy, and to those he left behind.”
by Patricia Stewart | Dec 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
There was a knock at the door. Now who would be calling at this time of night, I wondered? I got up from my workbench and headed toward the door. When I opened it, I found myself staring at myself. “Now, I can’t possibly be that fat,” I said to the android that had been built to replace me.
“I’m afraid so, old man,” it said with a chuckle. Then it did a slow pirouette where it made a slight pause at the 180 mark to shake its rotund buttocks. As it completed the 360 degree turn it added, “I am an exact facsimile, right down to the gray hairs on my chinny chin chin. Deny it if you want, but laser scanners don’t lie. Besides, I’m grateful for all this extra space,” it said as it padded its ample midsection. “They were able to pack 30% more batteries in here. Now, I could probably complete the Iditarod without needing a recharge.”
“Well,” I rebutted, “there’s a team of huskies thankful that you’ll be too busy to compete.” I motioned it in and closed the door. “My retirement doesn’t begin until the day after tomorrow,” I pointed out. “I didn’t think you were coming until then. Surely you know that I’ll be leaving in a few minutes, and I won’t be back for 24 hours.”
“Sure do,” it replied with a knowing smile. “I was hoping to go with you. You know, learn the route. Come on,” it pleaded, “it’ll be fun. What do you say?”
“Well, I suppose so,” I relented. “Last year, I got so tired, I almost crashed into the Himalayas. The Missis was furious. So, I guess it’ll be good to have a co-pilot, and you can help me with the heavy lifting too.” That’s when I noticed the android eyeing the inside of my shop like a child in a candy store.
“This place is awesome,” it remarked. “But it’s much smaller than I imagined it would be.”
“This is just my personal workshop,” I pointed out. “There’s a five hundred million square foot factory up the road. But your tour will have to wait. We need to get going. Grab that bundle over there and let’s head to the hangar.”
Once it became obvious which exit I was heading for, the android rushed past me claiming ‘shotgun’. I shook my head and laughed at its enthusiasm. Kudos to the programmers, I thought. I’ll make sure they receive a special ‘thank you’ gift for their efforts. After I put on my winter coat and hat, I climbed the access ramp and took a seat next to the android. I quickly secured my safety harness, and entered Kiritimati into the GPS. Then I pressed the remote control that opened the large hangar doors. In the moonlight, we could see a light snow falling outside. The android could barely sit still. “Do you want the honors?” I asked it.
“Oh boy, do I,” it replied. It took the reins from my outstretched hands and shouted ahead, “On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen…”
by submission | Dec 23, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson
The intelligence level of the Xzeckqi people was growing at an exponential rate. Just a few centuries prior they had been cooking over open fires and using stones to sharpen animal bones into spears. Now they were hunting with exploding projectiles and using electric ovens to prepare meals. And in the populous Jagxso region, a wide flattish land running nearly half the circumference of the tiny green world’s equator, there were wheeled carts moving by means of autonomous engines. All in all the Xzeckqi were proving to be quite inquisitive and inventive.
Their curiosity and thirst for learning had recently caused them to take up great interest in their planet’s geology. Prehistoric Xzeckqi had taken for granted the random and varying intricate formations of their world’s topography. Geometrically perfect shapes and angles littered the globe, all covered by the vibrant green of the thick ever-nourishing moss that grew from pole to pole. But the people knew that when digging down through the life-giving organism one found many different colors and strange materials. The moss was thought to feed directly on some of this mysterious layer that occupied the space between the biocrust and the ‘dock’ or dirt-and-rock layer whose great depth had yet to be determined.
Their curiosity of the middle layer went all the way back to the early development of tool making which was based on the study of some of the strange giant ‘stones’ found there. Early Xzeckqi people had studied the threaded lines on house-sized spiral formations and by copying them had developed one of the earliest simple machines — the screw. Of course the wheel had already been long invented by now, as giant wheels seemed to occur naturally nearly everywhere in their world, along with other wheel-based phenomena such as cogs, gears and pulleys, plus axles, levers, hinges, and countless other devices, waiting to be studied and then duplicated down to a manageable scale. Almost all modern technology now owed its existence to the excavation and copying of various formations found in the layer.
But the people wondered — how could natural formations be so perfect, with parts that looked as though they could still move with the precision of any modern machine or device. On they poured, searching for answers.
***
Meanwhile aboard the star freighter Constantine.
“Sergeant, why haven’t we stopped to dump our garbage? I want to get into warp before lunch!” The Captain rubbed his weary eyes and sipped his coffee. He could view the navscreen from where he stood well enough to see that the bright green dump planet, Tilpot IV, was below but falling away, yet the yellow lights on the custodial array glowed bright, showing the ship’s waste containers still quite full.
“Sorry Cap,” the young sergeant replied. “Collective orders. No more dumping on Tilpot IV until ecological survey performed. Don’t worry though. Jack’s Port, the big moon of Tilpot VII has been designated temporary dumping site until the survey is completed.”
The captain didn’t look impressed. “All the way out to the seventh planet at fuel-speed? I’d rather we drop back and do a little illegal dumping that aint gonna hurt a soul.”
Knowing fully that he could exercise his legal right at any time and place his superior under arrest based on Environmental Absolute 1.9 he decided to let his captain finish his coffee. “Like I said, don’t worry sir. I can get us up to .002 by fusing some of ‘hotter’ waste we have in container three. We’ll be there in no time. And besides…” He said sternly. “There might be something intelligent down there.”
by Julian Miles | Dec 22, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They always told me about the stately elegance of space warfare. The distances involved and the participants like battleships of old on the high seas, with all the computer aided aiming and evasion systems, and man seemingly only there to provide a human loss element to the casualty statistics.
“Nine o’clock high! Lamboda Fours! Break and run! Break and run!”
I sigh and tell my ship to run away. I have also read old stories where the battles were opposite to what I had been told, the great ships moving in dogfights on a titanic scale, the only common denominator being that man was yet again along for the ride.
“Casull Three, you’re lagging. Pick it up or you’re crispy.”
Asshole. Of course I’m lagging, you used me as a shield in the last run-in. I have holes in my holes. Should have changed my call sign to ‘Swiss Cheese’.
For all the fine rhetoric, the realities were that in a pitched battle, the computers spent too long working out the variables. When another ship entered the fray, all the participants took a moment to recalculate the optimums. There was actually a critical mass reached off Nardia where the whole battle stopped as just the right number of ships kept dropping in and out of range to keep everything doing the math instead of doing the fighting.
And computers just couldn’t do the random stuff that won wars and made legends. Like now. I told the ship it was punch-up time and I wanted to exceed all safety limits by eight percent on top of ignoring the fact I was an engine down. Then I stepped on the go button and carved an erratic loop back into our pursuers. The ship manoeuvred like a drunken duck as the missing engine made a mockery of programmed flight paths.
Which is where I took up the slack, using my love of spinning like a loon while snapping shots at moving targets and flying as the gods intended: Laughing and screaming in sheer joy. My touch on the stick overrode the computer pilot; my hand off the stick put it back in control, frantically correcting my carefully induced appearance of lack of control. Which made my manoeuvring utterly beyond any attempt by my opponents to gauge where the hell I was, let alone where I was going to be.
“What do you think you’re doing, Casull Three? Get back in formation.”
“That’s what I’m doing, asshole. By taking pre-emptive action to prevent ‘limping Bessie’ here becoming my coffin, I am removing the scary things so that you can slow your yellow ass down long enough for me to catch up. Sir.”
The laughter from the rest of the flight drowned out his threats. If he made it through another patrol without going west in a blue on blue, my middle name wasn’t ‘vindictive’. With that cheering thought, I kicked myself into a classic Immelmann, apart from the lateral twitches and the inversion I tacked on the end, to finish up looking down on my final opponent’s cockpit. The look on his face was priceless as I vectored my thrusters to place myself nose down and shot him in the head point blank. Actually I shot him in the cockpit as the quad blasters up front don’t do narrower than a metre. With a happy whoop I handed my ship back to itself, told it to return to limp mode and rejoin the flight.
‘Stately elegance’ my ass. If you’re not grinning, you’re not flying.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 21, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Eliot hunched his shoulders against the wind, the relentless sand picking at the seals of his gloves and headgear trying to find a way inside. He watched the glow of the sun disappear beyond the horizon, his waking period now fully begun.
It had been weeks since he’d seen another soul, perhaps years. Who kept count of such things anymore anyways?
The last city he’d abandoned to the ravages of this dust bowl planet had been a graveyard, he’d taken what he could carry, what little food and fresh water remained before the decay and vermin forced him back into the desert, back to his search for living humans.
There had to be more, they were so prolific on this rock before the coming, had spread so far, achieved so much. He’d visited countless monuments to the species’ achievement here, each sprawling steel and glass expanse a testament to human drive and ambition, each barren, vacant ghost-town a reminder that the planet doesn’t welcome strangers, doesn’t tolerate intrusion.
Midway through this day’s dark period, upon cresting a dune, Eliot found himself bathed in the glow of a distant settlement, one surrounded on three sides by mountainous ranges and shielded from the wind on the fourth side by the ragged standing wave of sand from which he now surveyed.
A few kilometers to either side and he would have walked right by, never knowing it was here. “How fortuitous,” his muffled voice strange inside the protective shell of his headgear.
It would take hours still to reach the city walls, and Eliot was tired and hungry. He slipped his backpack off his shoulders, careful not to catch a seam on the rigging and tear the fabric. The tiniest of holes in one’s armour out here could spell almost certain death. He dropped the pack to the ground, then sat cross legged with it before him and, unlatching the top, rummaged through the contents. He extracted a can of protein slurry, and another of complex carbs. These he attached to the receptors under the jawline of his helmet, one on either side. There was a rushing sound as the suit flushed the sand from within the joints, then made the connection and opened the seal. He closed his eyes and tolerated the thick fluid as the pressurized canisters forced it down his throat. It was best if one held their breath while eating.
Emptied, he ejected the spent cans and tossed them aside. By morning they would be just so much dust blowing in the wind.
He similarly attached and emptied a canister of fresh water into his suit, mixing it with the distilled sweat and urine of the past few weeks. He’d be resupplied soon, he could afford the luxury of fresh water.
Through a battered range finder he surveyed the walls of the city in the distance. Flood lights cast long shadows of the battlements and gun turrets that dotted the perimeter walls. They hurt his eyes if he looked directly at them. The city must be well stocked with battery stores if they could waste such energy through the night. Solar equipment perhaps, a rarity on a world where the very air worked tirelessly to reduce every exposed surface to grains of sand. Maybe nuclear. That would be a find indeed.
Fed and watered, Eliot shouldered his pack and began the long walk to this remains of civilization.
Inside, he could feel his contagion begin to boil. It knew as well as he that fresh meat awaited.
By the time the sun rose again, he’d have razed this city to the ground as he’d done so many times before.
His planet didn’t welcome strangers, didn’t tolerate intrusion.
