Be Patient, Brethren
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Astronaut Lazo Hora drove his rover down the sloping interior walls of the 3.6 billion year old Shackleton Crater near the moon’s South Pole. As his headlights probed into the perpetual night of the crater floor, he spotted a saucer-like object ...
Containment
Author : Bob Newbell
The members of the Galactic Security Council watched on the viewscreen as the bipedal alien in its bulky, white spacesuit erected a rod with a rectangle of cloth into the regolith of its planet's satellite. The starred and striped flag, the computer noted, ...
Colonists
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It started, as these things always do, with a kiss.
Advice is useless to the young. That is their curse and their strength. They have no idea that some of the things that they attempt are impossible. That’s why an alarmingly high percentage of ...
Far Deep
Author : Katrina Johnston
Within the Caves of Lozac under jagged vaulted ceilings, Razie Tay ventures eastward. Explosions crack like gunshot. ‘Sharding’ echoes bounce. Razie adjusts her helmet, snugs it tightly. Razor stalactites loom high above and sharp. Mineral icicles cleave and ...
Return From Red Zone
Author : Ray Daley
It'd been a great day in Red Zone. We'd been first to apply for passes since it was classified safe.
800 years is a long time. Even then, it was 'droids doing the rad sweeps. Residuals had dropped below the safe limit so The Council lifted the blockade. When we ...
Touching
Author : David Gill
The voice woke Phil from a sound sleep.
“There’s a problem, Phil.”
He found himself in the midst of saying, groggily, “What is it?”
“Supply pressure, Phil. It’s too high.”
Wiping the sleep from his eyes, Phil was at the console correcting the problem.
“Thanks, ...
This Is What It's All About
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
We’d found some bizarre planets before, but this one required a whole new category of its own. I maneuvered my one-man exploratory craft toward the strange surface. The rest of the crew waited aboard Wanderer in high orbit. Some called this place ...
Librarian
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Unauthorised access to archives. Overdue viruser ‘Aloysius’ in serious breach.”
The info-alarm finishes as I slide onto the longseat, dermal plates on mesh conducting me into the antechamber. Checking my vody for artefacts, I find my virtual self ...
Found
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Man in Charge wears a transparent faceplate. The only muscles still present are the ones needed to move his eyes, eyelids, and jaw. The rest is just chalk-white bone under two inches of glossy, transparent resin. The irises of his ...
The Needs of the Few
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Slowly, the door of my stasis chamber lifted up. Warm cabin air eddied in, rippling across the exposed hairs on my arms and legs. The tingling felt good. I had started this mission more than seventy years ago, a mere decade after the invention of ...
Priest Hole
Author : Morrow Brady
It wasn't unusual that Captain Boscobel wanted the Priest Hole built on his flight deck. What was unique was that he wanted it directly connected to a portal.
Portals offered instantaneous escape to a predetermined destination, but like most emerging technologies ...
Uptown
Author : Derrick Paulson
“Uptown”
When Principal Wallace came back from his mid-morning meeting his secretary informed him that a student had been sent to see him; but, when he opened the door to his office, he hadn't expect to find the sophomore girl kneeling on the carpet, her hands ...
Cavale
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The other twenty-nine prisoners of Asteroid Mine 119F stood around me in a tight circle, their faces besieged by both fear and anger.
Henderson, almost sixty, yet fifteen kilos my better and as hard as the rock around us, screamed at me, spit ...
War is Hell
Author : J.D. Rice
No one ever comes into manhood dreaming they'd one day go off to war. Sure, some boys sign up voluntarily, in peacetime and besides, with good notions like “defending one's country” and “promoting democracy.” But those are just words. No one ever really goes to war ...
The Inheritors
Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer
When the Quantum Drive was invented in 2023 the world was transformed; not all at once, mind you, but by degrees.
Initially, it was just the career explorers who ventured into the vast and unknown regions of space in their state-of-the-art ...
The View From Here
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
After the successes of breeding for telepaths and telekinetics, they moved on to the more esoteric strains. My mum and dad had the right genetic markers for rarest of them, precognition. So they joined the program and had two kids with everything ...
A. I. of the Beholder
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We should have given them feelings.
It was decided in the beginning that to give Artificial Intelligences a baseline gamut of the twenty-seven identifiable human emotions would be a horrible mistake.
Giving a robot the ability to love, to feel ...
Red Jizo
Author : James McGrath
“One of us is going to have to make a move, y’know?”
I did know, but that didn’t make it any easier. We’d been in a stalemate for three minutes; our pistols pointed at them and theirs at us. However, the advantage lay with them, as while the two damned ...
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