by submission | Dec 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
It’s just me and her out here. Stranded. Helpless.
I was taking her back home. She needed a change of scenery. Hell, we were a quarter of the way there when everything went wrong.
It was a bad wire. The gauge was too small because some stupid color-blind electrician can’t tell the difference between brown and green, and when I sent the signal to cut the acceleration to avoid another ship a few days away the already hot wire vaporised. Acceleration stopped, which was good. But now I can’t start it again. We’re going fast, but not fast enough to get both of us there on time.
There’s not enough food to last that long.
I’ve been over it a thousand times, sitting at the controls, helpless. We can slow down fine when we get there, that won’t be a problem. We can’t really turn without the rear thrusters, and the decelerators are single use. I try to turn around and then we’ll be worse off than before.
I have tools, I have parts. I could fix the wire. That is, I could fix the wire if it weren’t in the sealed tube on the outside of the hull that’s supposed to keep the primary wiring alive. I could switch to back-up systems, if it weren’t for the fact that when the primary wire went it took the whole tube with it. I could call for help but, let’s be honest, I’m not rich enough for anyone to care.
I looked at the food. Even on a survival diet, rationing things out to the very end, we’re a month short. If I just launched myself out the airlock she’d have enough to get by fairly comfortably. The problem is, if she knows I killed myself it’s all over. She’d relapse. She’d hear voices in her head again, see things move that really shouldn’t. She’d be dead a month before the ship gets there. But if she thinks I’m fighting, then she’ll be fine. She’ll fight too.
I really hate to lie to her like this. If she knew what was going on she would probably kill herself right then to save me. I can’t let that happen.
I programmed the computer to decelerate when we get there. It won’t need me for that. I’ve written this note, too. If I make it, fine, she won’t need to read it. If I don’t make it, and I don’t think I will, then she’ll know once she’s with family and friends.
I’ve stopped eating already. I’ll write it off as being sick. She’ll buy into wholesale.
I hope you’re not mad when you read this.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This is the best of all possible worlds. Or so the time-travelers tell us.
They have given their future away to make our present the best it can be.
They gave science a good, healthy goose early on around the Babylonians times. They killed the despots in their cribs over the millennia.
This is the land of perfect, near-immortal bodies and technology that borders on magic.
Every morning, they publish newspapers on the feeds. They’re the newspapers that would have been printed in the unaltered world. We all remember the picture of the Hindenburg and followed with great interest the antics of the World War Two issues. Every day there’s a new issue and every day we’re reminded how lucky we are. We’d never even had a small battle!
The ideas in the pages fascinate us but repulse us at the same time. This new present is obviously better than the one given to us in the papers.
Late at night, I dream of presidential elections, mass slaughter, ‘economies’ and death at 90. I wake up terrified and then immediately relieved that it was all a dream.
God bless our time-traveling saviors.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Tesla shielding is a magnificent thing. Invented in the early Twentieth by the crackpot Serbian inventor Nicola Tesla, it absorbs tremendous amounts of energy harmlessly. A suit sized generator can withstand several plasma bursts or hundreds of micro meteor hits before the unit is overloaded. But they don’t do well against slow moving, low energy objects, such as an errant spanner, a lump of ore accidentally dislodged or … a bullet.
I was on an infrequent visit dirtside. I had only been back to Mars three times in twenty years. Twice for funerals. I don’t know why, I can’t raise the dead… too expensive.
This time was business. I had come in person to sign a contract with Belt Foundries Amalgamated for a massive find. I had to beat Dieter “Gritty” Schmidt to file my claim. The Sonuvabitch had been jumping me for the past ten years. I was damned if I’d let him get this one.
After filing, I wandered into an antique shop. Knives are handy when prospecting and I could always find a cheap supply at these old junk shops. I was sorting through a tray of rusty blades when an object on a nearby shelf caught my eye.
“What the hell is that,” I asked, stabbing a grimy finger at the thing. It was roughly shaped like a blaster, but looked metallic.
“This,” said the pawnbroker pulling the object out as if it were the Holy Grail itself, “is a .357 Colt Python. In the parlance of the time, a “GUN”.
I took the piece. It was damned heavy for a weapon. “Stainless steel,” he said, reading my mind.
“Where’s the power supply?”
“There isn’t one. It’s a chemical reaction weapon.”
“No Shit. So a personal T field…”
“Won’t even slow the projectile down.”
“How much,” I grinned.
I returned to my claim via a rather circuitous route. I came in out of Jupiter so the gas giant’s radiation would hide my ships signature. Sure enough, there was Gritty’s ship and there was Gritty nosing around my claim. I opened a broadband link.
“Hey asshole, what the hell are you doing poking’ around my ‘roid.”
“Hello Mike. Nothing wrong with checking out a lucrative prospect is there?”
“You know damn well it’s mine. I already filed. Look it up. It’s posted.”
“I was just being neighbourly. Just thought I’d stop by and see if you needed a hand.”
I popped out of the airlock and blasted his ship a couple of times with my plazer. That would get his attention.
“What, the hell…?”
Sure enough, he pulled his plazer and drew down on me. Just for fun, I popped his head with a quick burst. His T field held, but it sure pissed him off. He launched a string of profanities and let me have it several times with his own plazer, expectin’ me to turn tail for my ship. I stood my ground and pulled out my antique Python, levelling it at him.
“What the hell is your major malfunction boy?”
“Just this,” I said, and unloaded all six rounds into his suited figure. I watched the delicate ballet as his body spun, issuing a plume of scarlet from his breached suit. I watched his body became smaller and smaller as it drifted away from me. Then it hit me. In my haste for revenge, I hadn’t secured a tether.
A quick thought ran through my mind, “For every action…”
“SON OF A BITCH… If anybody ever hears this transmission, I have one thing to say. ‘NEWTON’S A DICK!’”
by submission | Dec 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
They all swam around the giant vessel in wonder. If this worked their hive would easily become the most prominent of either the day or the night side. Their queen would be elevated to near godlike status, although it was Quetrum who had made it all happen.
He glowed proudly as he and several of the thinking council watched it inflate. Like all technology on their world, the vessel was organic and had been bred in a lineage of flying creatures able to go systematically higher and higher over generations. This one though, called Shaylala, was to be the first to actually leave the atmosphere. And because the original concept had been Quetrum’s he would of course be the first passenger.
The others wished him well as he swam toward the goliath where a porthole in the tough outer hide had suddenly opened. He swam inside and it immediately closed behind him. Then he was carried via a series of purposeful currents into the cockpit where an inner organ encased him in a protective cocoon.
Quetrum saw the others floating and waiting as Shaylala made transparent a small window of her skin so that he would be able to view all that took place. From this distance he could only imagine their wondrous looks as the vessel quickly inflated to more than a hundred times its resting size. Then the creature’s internal elemental factory began separating and expelling heavy gasses causing it to rise up and float away, a behemoth biological balloon.
Quetrum knew that reporter workers were already busy sending pulses via the great weed web to thousands of other hives around the globe. The bragging rights would be theirs and theirs alone.
He had flown before in Shaylala’s smaller ancestors, but never to these heights. Below he saw the expanding sea, and could still make out the many structures and tubes of his home hive below the waves. Then soon he saw the dark shapes of Brahier and Toksana Hives to the north and east. Never had he imagined that he would see all three hives of the state at the same time! But his excitement grew even more as the shore of the polar cap came into view and as the horizon began to curve until he could eventually almost see the entire dayside ocean. My, what would his grandqueen think if she were alive today? He couldn’t even imagine.
The inflated vessel was now stretched almost to full capacity as the stratosphere of the water planet thinned away to near nothingness. Quetrum braced himself, as he knew what was coming next. They required lateral movement in order for the experiment to be a complete success.
The creature’s elemental factory instantly released the chemical contents of one chamber into another and the jet plume was visible from the hives far below as Shaylala rocketed herself and her lone passenger into a single freefall orbit.
Quetrum took in the stars, clearer than he had ever seen them, and the beautiful jewel that was the planet below. As they crossed the nightside he wondered about all the dark dweller hives down there below the ice and imagined his distant cousins being terribly jealous of their accomplishment.
But alas, Shaylala had only enough fuel for one revolution so once back to the dayside they careened toward the home hive with massive skin parachutes slowing them all the way until finally they touched safely back down onto the waves near the swimming throngs of jubilant spectators.
Quetrum and Shaylala were the heroes; and for their people this was only the beginning.
by submission | Dec 22, 2010 | Story
Author : D. W. Hughes
Yosef Strand took a moment after stepping out of the drop-pod to look once again at his home planet. It was his first time back after the vacation started, and he noticed for the first time how beautifully it had been terraformed. The plants had been mixed together in tiny little clumps and groups; quite unlike those huge fields of single species he had seen on the backwater moons.
Seemingly stepping out of thin air, Yosef exited the cloaked pod. He walked the main road to town, wearing the black hat of an adult of his people despite being only sixteen.
A man, also walking from the podport to the village, spoke to his wife behind him. Yosef could tell he was a tourist quite easily by his lack of facial hair and his accent. The man told his wife that it was ridiculous: a giant waste of government money. His wife responded that yes, it probably was, but wasn’t this a universal heritage site, and weren’t uncontacted peoples so rare these days? Yosef told the married couple to hush. He asked them if they wanted any eavesdroppers to have to get selectively mindwiped for their careless talk. They shook their heads and silenced themselves.
Yosef passed a man whom he had known very well since childhood on a horse and buggy. Yosef said hello, and the main greeted him cordially, as though he had not noticed that Yosef had been on rumspringa for the past year. In fact, he hadn’t. No one in the village had. Those Cultural Preservation Authority guys had some nice tech.
The man ignored the tourists: he couldn’t see them. Cultural tourists, made invisible by the CPA, paid for some of the government’s upkeep of this place, at least.
Passing the squat building of the blacksmith, Yosef entered the largest building in the village, made of hand-cut wood: the town hall, where town meetings and church services were held. He spoke the password his CPA contacts had given him, and the door to the basement opened up out of the floor. Everybody else in the village had forgotten it was there. After he walked down and into the basement, the door closed and became invisible once more.
In a metallic room waited the town’s pastor and mayor, Father Mendelson, along with Yosef’s CPA monitors who had checked up on him throughout his off-world journeys. They sat around a large table with a small cube on it.
Father Mendelson greeted Yosef, they and the CPA handlers chatted a little about Yosef’s rumspringa. Father Mendelson told him a couple of stories from his own rumspringa, which he alone of the townspeople remembered. The pastor then asked Yosef if he had made his choice.
It had never really been a choice for Yosef at all. Of course he would stay. Everyone chose to stay. Yosef remembered the civil war between the planets far away, of the news footage of anti-matter bombs dissolving inhabited moons. He remembered those impoverished people in the cities of the Core, who would kill for food or drugs.
Yosef said goodbye to his main CPA handler, Geoff, and joked that he would never forget him. He sat in the single empty chair and looked into the cube.
Yosef Strand woke up in his bed with his mother shaking him and telling him to feed the chickens. School would start in a couple hours, and he was to be tested on how the Amish had arrived here, in what they all thought was western Pennsylvania. In what they all thought was the late 19th century.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This planet’s dominant life was insectile and large. A special breed of ranch-hand was needed.
Jake was a milliboy.
The millipede was as big around as a tree trunk, bright red and armoured. The saddle looked ridiculous on such a creature but it served its purpose. It kept Jake astride his steed.
Jake and a few hundred others worked this ranch. Breaking in the tranchlas, the kaydids, the scorps juners, skeeters, and the jackflies. Wasn’t one insect a body could trust, the earthers said. It just wasn’t in the creatures. They operated on a completely emotionless level. You couldn’t build up a rapport with them.
Jake and the other milliboys would beg to differ on that point.
“You spend enough time around the ‘sects,” Jake and the milliboys said, “you get to know the way they think, what the twitch of a leg means, the angle of one of those huge multifaceted eyes. The ‘sects know you’re watching. They learn to avoid pain.”
Jake’s mount was addicted to meth. It was easy to make around here. The millipedes were the easiest to hook, easiest to train, and damn near impossible to kill. Those pincers up front underneath that bulbous, eyeless face could cut a prayer in half or so they say. Slow movers but they never turned on their riders after they had been broken in and hooked on the drug.
Penelope was breaking in a mantis. Only the girls could work the mantii. The milliboys just got their heads nipped off when they tried. With the pheromones in the air, the female mantis could tell that it was a problem of dominance, not survival. A contest of will. There were dozens of species of mantis. They made up half of the planet’s population. Mantis-breaker girls were in demand. Prayers, they were called.
Penelope hadn’t lost one yet. She was there, hat in hand, whooping as the mantis bucked, kicking up fantails of brown dirt. Penelope had a hold of the wings with her legs and she was smiling from ear to ear, freckles dotted on her red cheeks.
After a long time, the mantis calmed down and knelt. The contest was over.
“Well, hell. I think this’ll be my new mount.” She said and slapped her knee after dismounting, laughing as she walked over to Jake.
“You always were a firecracker, Pen.” Jake said, smiling underneath the brim of his hat.
“How much money you got in that mouth of yours, Jake?” asked Pen. “I reckon I can break a hive queen before you can tomorrow.”
The other milliboys laughed. Jake stopped smiling. He squinted up at the two suns as if measuring something in the sky. He looked back at Penelope. Everyone around them went silent.
“You’re on” said Jake, smiling again. She smiled back.
Around them, money started changing hands.
