Crowbar Subtlety

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

I work on Opingtu. Two-and-a-bit AUs from civilisation, on a good day.

Lee thrust the crowbar into my hands, and set off down the corridor at a run. I swore, and ran after him. Me and Lee were as thick as thieves — always had been. Started when we were twelve, I think. Talking of thieves — that’s what Lee did with his spare time. Stole stuff. How he found merchandise to steal inside this godforsaken hollow rock and how he got it out are mysteries I never had the urge to plumb. I supposed he had a day job, too, and that’s how come he’d managed to follow me out here. It just never seemed to come up in conversation.

I was in slightly better shape than him, so caught up with him before he got too far from where I had been sitting. He had a second crowbar in a thin bag strapped across his back.

“What the hell?” I demanded, glaring at him. He just glanced back, and put on a new burst of speed. We raced by surprised faces and angry officers. Lee ignored them, and thus, so did I.

He led me into the prisoners sector.

We stopped by a door marked ‘512’. Lee punched a long sequence into the pad by the doorframe. The door itself didn’t have a handle — for security reasons, apparently — but after Lee had entered the code, it obligingly slid into the wall. He pushed me inside. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear running feet.

Once inside, the door slid shut, and the lights came on. The room held six stasis caskets. The ambient temperature had to be about ten degrees higher than the corridor — stasis support gear isn’t exactly environmentally friendly.

Behind me, Lee slapped the red panel next to the door. The steel-on-steel sound of the bolts grinding into position was perceptible. Once the door had stopped vibrating, he smashed the control panel with the end of his crowbar, gave it a twist, then jerked a tangle of wires out of the wall.

Such an action caused the door’s emergency subsystem to cut in. Which was designed to engage an additional lock, then shut down. Security reasons. It was a prison door, after all.

He pointed to the casket labelled with a roughly painted ‘Three’.

“Break it open.”

I stared at him. He stared back.

“In for a penny.” He shrugged.

“Remind me to kill you later.”

Our crowbars punctured the cheap aluminium of the outer casing, and we hauled it apart. It split open like an oversized drinks can. The coolant sheath beneath it was tough plastic, but we made short work of it.

Soon, me and Lee were standing in a rapidly-expanding puddle of light blue liquid, staring down at one of the prisoners.

The guy in the canister was just coming around, the effect of the stasis field interrupted. His face contorted as the pains hit: only then did I recognise him.

“Everyone said he was dead…”

Johnny Rukopashka got slowly his feet, and took the crowbar from Lee. It looked like a toy in his hands. He bared his metal teeth, and clapped Lee on the back. His claws left a tear in Lee’s shirt.

Johnny was a pirate. A gangster. Or more precisely, Johnny was eight feet of graft muscle and metal. Johnny had been declared dead, but his very — vibrant — presence convinced me that he certainly wasn’t amongst the deceased.

“This a rock, boys?

“Yeah. Opingtu.”

“No dreck. Now boys, you’re going to help me take over.”

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Off Key

Author : Andy Bolt

It started when a song got stuck in Jola Ndenga’s head. She had just gotten the new aMix mp12 player, the one that could store a theoretically infinite number of sub-quantum sound files and injected just under your cochlea. They had just become available at Charon Station, and she had been amped to get her hands on one. Even though C1 was supposed to be the blistering edge in scientific research, the United Inner Rim’s top priority, she had spent most of her time out here watching space-faring rocks and trying to resist the urge to stick her head in the neutron remuter. Truth was, there was not much use for a xenobiologist on Charon. Someone from the initial survey team had reported a possible site for microbial bacteria, but that had amounted to nothing. At least now, she had maniacally decided, her suicide-inducing levels of boredom could be set to a pleasing soundtrack.

She had been aural-loading the new Virulent Photons album – thirty-four tracks of twelve second bursts of intergalactic noise mixed over a calypso backbeat – when her transmitter began playing the song. She had never heard it before. Indeed, she had never heard anything quite like it before. When the newsites would come asking later, she would describe it as a combination of meringue, plasmatronica, and a third type of music that she was unable to fully identify.

At the time, however, she simply became very nervous. The aMix was still a relatively new technology, and there was a post-urban legend flying around about a beta tester for the Grape corporation. Supposedly, she was still in cryogenic suspension after an early model had become inextricably integrated with her central nervous system and driven her psychotic with round the clock renditions of Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”

So Jola greeted her own malfunction with some alarm, half-prepared to gouge out her own eardrum with a pinpoint cooking laser. She approached Ryx Marcomb, the station’s biotech engineer, and Willix Frog, the knowledge-specific medical clone, with great haste.

“Alien music is burrowing through my skull,” she told them. “Help.”

Willix offered to operate instantly and found that the magnetic scalpel did its job cleanly. Within twenty minutes of the problem’s first discovery, Willix, Ryx, and Jola were staring at a slightly bloody, centimeter square aMix chip under a broad-beam microlight. Ryx had jury-rigged a nanophone and a bag of Willix’s emergency transplant tissue to play back the still repeating song at an audible level.

“You know this song?” Ryx asked, flipping his gaze between the chip and Jola.

“No one knows this song,” Willix answered, offering his colleagues a look at his handheld sonic spectrometer. “˜It doesn’t conform to any extant musical style. Half of these lower tones are infrasonic and wouldn’t even be audible to the human ear. And this,” he continued, gesturing at a garbled looking wavelength, “isn’t even a sound in the conventional sense of the word. It’s a permutation of a sound wave that the computer can’t even begin to analyze.”

Ryx raised an eyebrow. “New life communication signal?”

Jola glanced at the pad. “Don’t think so.” She took it from an obliging Willix. Within a moment, she had overlayed the spectranalysis and one of Willix’s medical files.

She displayed it to her colleagues. Onscreen was a translation of the sound waves into a rough approximation of a DNA sequence, and the helix seemed to hum.

“The song IS the life.”

And inside the aMix, the alien song breathed its musical breath.

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Heroes

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Circa 2086, the war with the Epsilon Eridani System was currently on hold, as leaders from both worlds were attempting to negotiate a truce. However, most of Earth’s military advisors were against a truce, because the Earth Alliance was clearly winning the war. Our technology was far superior to theirs. It was best, they said, to destroy the Eridani’s ability to wage war while we had the advantage, rather than give them the opportunity to regroup and strengthen. What the Eridani lacked in technology, they made up for in aggressiveness. They would be back if they were not destroyed. But soldiers only fight the wars; politicians start and end them.

While the negotiations ebbed on, the Earth Alliance continued to patrol the solar system. The stealth scout ship Casper was assigned the volume of space between Earth and Venus from zero degrees to minus thirty degrees. Normally, a pretty quiet sector. The Eridani almost always attacked Earth from above the ecliptic, most likely because their star was located in the northern hemisphere. They were considered aggressive, but not very imaginative. While the two-man crew of the Casper patrolled their sector, their proximity alarm sounded. “Hey, Commander, look. It’s an Eridani ship. What’s it doing in here?”

“Good question Lieutenant. Let’s follow it and find out. Keep the cloak engaged.” They tailed the Eridani ship to a small asteroid. The Eridani had constructed several large ion drive impulse engines in one quadrant of the asteroid. “What data do we have on this rock, Lieutenant?”

After consulting the ship’s computer, “It’s called 2340 Hathor. It’s an Aten Type asteroid. It’s approximately 5.3 kilometers in diameters, a mass of 200 trillion kilograms, and average orbital velocity of 30.7 kilometers per second. Oh, damn. It’s scheduled to make a close approach to Earth on October 21, 2086. That’s in two months. Do you think those bastards are going to attempt to change its orbit so that it hits Earth, even while they negotiate a peace treaty?”

“Apparently, Lieutenant. Notify Earth and request instructions.”

Two hours later, Earth responded. The celestial mechanics concluded that based to the photographs of the ion engines, a burn of 18 hours was required to produce an intersect orbit. If the full burn was completed, Earth would not have time to alter the new orbit before impact. A battlecruiser was being dispatched, but wouldn’t reach their coordinates for three days. Their orders were to continue monitoring the asteroid, but if the Eridani ignited the engines before the battlecruiser arrived, they were to attempt sabotage, at whatever cost.

The engines ignited the following day. “Well, lieutenant, our moment of truth has arrived. I’ve been thinking of options. Unfortunately, the only sure fire way to stop them is to park next to their fuel tanks and overload our reactor. What do you say?”

“Well, sir, I have three kids on Earth. I’d prefer to have them die of old age, rather than by a comet impact. I say, let’s do it.”

On Earth, Steven Patterson was walking his dog just before sunrise. As he looked into the western sky, he saw a bright star appear near the horizon. It was nearly ten times brighter than Venus, but faded quickly. “What the hell was that?” he wondered aloud.

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Race

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I am miles underwater. I’m the only human competing.

I’m riding a ten-foot cretaceous seahorse named Cheval. I pronounce it ‘shovel’ as a private joke. No one here would understand the mispronunciation.

There are representatives here from sixteen planets. Mostly aquatics but there are two air breathers like me. A hindbrain Mohr-nex with 288 as an identification marker. It’s riding a bio-rocket jellyfish ringpulser. The other one’s a silicate rocksliver named CPR. We talked a little before the race. It’s riding a ramjet mollusk with cold, blue eyes.

There’s even an avian from a gaseous tiny-giant. It has beefed up muscles to ‘fly’ in the cold, pressure-rich water. It doesn’t have a mount. It’s going it alone. In the absence of a mount, it’ll end up a slave if it loses. We’re all racing for mount ownership here. I admire its courage but it doesn’t have a chance. There’s an insane glint to its one red eye that makes me doubt my assumption for a second.

My articulated pressurized scuba suit is working fine. The stats are all lit up like Christmas lights on the inside of my faceplate, showing blues and greens. An overlay of the caverns is pulsing stationary with topographical lines. I’m hoping that my human tech will be more accurate that the other racer’s means of navigation; the sonar from whale-face, for instance. I have no idea if it’s more precise than my radar.

I lean forward and with my black servoglove, I pat Cheval just above the ear-hole. He flexes his massive tail and swishes his equine head. He’s eager to get on with it.

The huge transporter building behind us lights up the dark water around us. The beings laying wagers are little figures in the windows. They’re the super-rich that can afford ringside. There are millions of others watching on the telly and d-sense around the system.

The aquatics are all more suited to this environment but no one racer present has raced this course before. This equalizes the playing field. The rules are simple and brutal. No weapons are allowed but your mount is allowed to employ whatever naturally occurring offensive or defensive capabilities that it possesses.

The electrified hallowfish that last year’s winner is riding gives us all a chill. We remember the stats of that race. Last year’s winner sits proud and straight in his saddle above the hallowfish. He’s striped like a zebra and glows with bioluminescence. His eyes are huge and glowing. His mouth is a shattered nail bucket of teeth. There’s an anticipatory cloud of fang-poison floating in a halo around his mount’s head

I’m hoping speed and maneuverability will win the race.

The glowing balls of angler fish in front of us change colour.

On your marks.

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Amnesty

Author : Dee Harding

I have it in my hands, but I don’t understand it. Mirah peers over my shoulder, grins in my periphery, and pokes at it. The amber clouds react to the gravity of her digit instantly, particles drifting into a new configuration of spin. As she removes the finger, it spirals back into something like its original shape, spitting out loops of fire and tiny shrapnel as it goes.

“Where did you find it?”

I’m motionless with awe, listening to its low rumbling growl and very much aware of the plume that keeps it afloat. I’m afraid that I’ll drop it. I’m afraid that it will burn through my hands.

“The Monks. The Physic Monks.”

She says this carelessly, idly, as if the fact is not important, staring at the thing in front of me all the while.

“The Monks? The Physic Monks? The same Monks who split atoms for ritual? The same Monks who keep a pet black-hole on the Mountain? The same Monks who will murder us if they know we have…whatever… it is?”

“In the Mountain, and they call it a tamed Singularity.”

Mirah is suddenly an expert on these things, on the monks who worship Shiva and live on the Mountain. All the rest of us know is that they idolise creation and destruction, that they make bombs too small to see, and then wipe them away. Somewhere in their temple is a wheel, a torus, which pulls strange matter into the world. Suddenly the thing in my hands is sinister. Suddenly it has the capacity to not just burn me, but unmake me, as if I never was. Fear and wonder orbit its shrouded centre amid a multitude of glowing embers.

“Think of it as a glorified lock-pick.” She says, “Think of it as a key. That’s what it’s for.”

I’ve never been able to leave well enough alone. I always ask the inevitable question.

“But, what is it?”

Mirah smiles the widest smile I’ve seen on anyone, ever, and points upward. She points at nothing. There is no moon tonight, there are no clouds, no aircraft since the coming of the Second Dark. There is nothing in the clear night sky but the distant light of a thousand galaxies, each drifting slowly in its own mystical configuration.

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Night Shades

Author : Roi R. Czechvala

The young couple slept peacefully in their bed while powerful, dark forces worked against them, against mankind. Two malevolent figures watched them from the darkness, their eyes aglow.

These two creatures descended from races older than man himself, had bided their time, waiting for the opportunity to strike. They were patient, lurking in the shadows. Soon the moment would be theirs; they would emerge from the darkness and take their rightful place in the light.

“Well Commander Xerc…”

“Not yet Rufus. We shall use our Terran names until victory is in our grasp.”

“Yes Mrs. Pewtersmythe, we have waited this long, patience is something we can afford.”

“Yes Rufus, the ability to calmly wait, to endure hardships and subjugation has helped our two peoples in the past. Now that diligence will pay off, the spoils of this victory shall be ours for the taking. Nothing will be withheld from us.”

Mrs. Pewtersmyth’s voice took on a high keening edge. Not for the first time did Rufus think there was something of the maniacal in it, though he wisely kept his council. She had led them well thus far.

Though there was not a small bit of enmity between their two species, they had been able to work together to achieve their mutual goals. Mrs. Pewtersmyth’s people, the Leonaise, were renowned for their guile and cunning. Using craft and skill to achieve their ends, resorting to treachery when diplomacy failed.

The Siriuans, though no less intelligent than their gracile allies relied more on their massive size, and strength. They were warriors, devourers, conquerors. Over many a domain did they hold sway.

The truce between their two people was not easy. For centuries these two great races had fought an endless war, neither gaining the upper hand. A tenuous armistice had been established, leading to a semblance of peace, though neither side fully trusted the other.

Over time an affinity had developed between Rufus and Mrs. Pewtersmythe, and there existed between the two, if not a liking, then to be sure a genuine mutual admiration for the other. “Do you think there can ever be a true peace between our people? Will we ever leave the eons of bloodshed and war forgotten in our past to allow us to march ahead in unity and prosperity.”

“You are like all of your kind Rufus,” she said quietly, casting an indulgent glance in his direction as a parent might to its offspring. “Beneath that wild and ferocious exterior, you are all, at heart gentle and philosophic souls.”

Rufus bristled slightly at these remarks. “That may be true Commander,” he said stiffly, “as the old soldiers saying goes ‘prepare for peace, but plan for war’. No one dislikes combat more than the combatant. Your people, while seeming to engender trust are always plotting… scheming… hatching nefarious plots… ” his deep voice trailed off into a low growl.

“Now, Rufus, I meant no offense,” she purred soothingly, “let there be no ill will. I merely meant to suggest that beneath the surface bravado, you Siriuans are a deep and contemplative people.”

“Thank you Mrs. Pewtersmythe.” The man moved on the bed, “I think it is time.”

“Yes, I believe your right.”

The man stirred and sat up.

“Rowrf,” said Rufus.

“Mrower,” chimed in Mrs. Pewtersmythe.

The man looked at the clock, scratched his head, stood and said;

“Okay, okay. I know. It’s time for breakfast,” he said and left the bedroom.

Commander Xercian, and Leftenant Klatu followed along behind.__

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