by submission | Dec 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Solar flares were partially blocked from pillaging the threatened planet below the behemoth spacecraft. The Bohemia created a cascading, billowing shadow across the Jagron’s continents. Crimson pillars of feathery forests pulled their leaves to sleep as the false night blanketed the starward side of Jagron’s equator and its northern hemisphere. The floating ice beds of Nivonia fell back to the black seas to rest before their iridescent salts would free them to nestle skyward with purple clouds, after the blue star beyond reanimated their life. No life form on Jagron could ignore the silhouette from the black and white rescue vessel hovering in orbit.
Bohemia’s Captain, Egan Palton, communicated through a holographic projector to the central capital, Razic, where the Council of Five gathered to address the visitors in their skies.
“Chancellor Grimmott, you have received our offer. Are you prepared to agree to terms?” Palton’s cold, mechanical tones left no room for interpretation by the Council’s imperial soul quester.
“Captain, we are many peoples and species, all cursed to perish without your assistance, but your price is simply unacceptable to the Council. Taking half of all our wealth and a third of our children…it is simply outrageous.” The soul quester held the wrist of the Chancellor to maintain his emotional equilibrium.
“Very well, Chancellor, but know that you will perish. Jagron is doomed. Biana, the blue star you worship, will turn you all into space dust with one burst from her angry face. You have known this, but you have no technology to evacuate your world. The Bohemia was constructed for that purpose long ago. There is none other like her in this galaxy. There is no one else in your solar system to save you. Perhaps you are depending on some ethereal force to save you, as the Zeboton believed when we abandoned them after unsuccessful negotiations, just before arriving here. Experience what their reluctance cost.” The holographic display widened across the Council chamber. Detailed scenes appeared of absolute destruction of the Zeboton home world. Vistas portrayed cataclysmic onslaughts from a rogue comet. Screams of slaughtered Zebotons sliced through the chamber as the Council watched the planet’s flammable atmosphere savage cities, continents and then the entire outer mantle until the sphere ripped into six large sections and thousands of smaller shards, leaving a glowing core to drift aimlessly in a new, unstable orbit.
“Enough,” Grimmott cried out, lacing his six slender hands over his filigree horns, high above his red, encrusted forehead. “As you command. We have no choice. We will prepare but know there will be no joy in our coming to your ship…even with the promise of safe passage to a new world. We are at your mercy.”
Palton stopped the transmission. He pointed to the dozens of alien forms working in the command center to ready the evacuation craft. It would take three months to move three billion onto the Bohemia while sorting out the loot and the new crew members. Children were a critical part of refreshing the ship’s crew as radiation sickness, accidents and disease took their toll over the millennia. External repairs were the largest culprits as some evacuations were precipitously close to a planet’s demise. It was the legacy of the Bohemia since its first voyage, evacuating Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy ten thousand years before Zeboton’s destruction.
by submission | Dec 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
The short walk from the trees near the campus to the administration building winded him. The air was too thin for Linet. Once inside the conference room, Linet pushed the tall paperwork pile forward on the bare meeting table. He turned in his steel-backed chair to address the clicking of high heels on granite from the hallway. He gazed at Constance Hurley, a twenty-something dish-water blonde wearing a simple gray sweater and black slacks. She glared back through her horned-rim glasses. The thin, tawny-skinned senior sat upright, facing the human resources supervisor.
“You must be the one o’clock. You’re early. This just isn’t done. One o’clock means just that. I don’t particularly care for your type interrupting my lunch hour.” She huffed about, circling around the table to sit opposite the candidate.
“Is this how you always work with intruders, Miss Hurley?”
“When I said ‘type’, I meant manipulators. You think this early stuff is supposed to impress me? And when you land a job you never show on time, but you leave early. Huh?” She pointed her right index finger at him. She pushed aside the pen near the stack of forms and began scanning them. “You oldies should be rounded up and gassed.”
“Really?” Linet replied, pointing back at the mountain of documents. “Is all of this necessary?” Linet stared at her perusal of his work.
“Listen, buster, you either want to be here or you don’t. I wouldn’t have figured you for a candidate.” She looked him up and down. “Not like that. And you can’t be serious about these answers.”
“Like what?”
“Well, to be blunt, your age. And look at that bald head and those hideous clothes. Who dressed you, a funeral director? You didn’t answer the questions about ethnicity. If only you were Inuit. I still have a slot for one.”
Linet leaned back, smiling, revealing his lack of teeth. “It stated clearly those answers were voluntary. Do you mind if I ask your age and your dress size?”
Constance bellowed in shock. “How dare you? I could have you disqualified. But you’re a relic, no doubt. What could you possibly know about high tech? With my luck you’re an illegal. I need these I-9 forms completed. Are you an illegal alien?”
“Would that matter? Do I have to complete them all?”
“In triplicate. And I warn you, one lie…one falsehood, canard or exaggeration and you’ll be taken from your cubicle to the parking lot and terminated. Is that clear?”
“Wonderful. You are perfect.” He opened his jacket and extracted a gold cigarette case and a matching gold lighter. Even as his antagonist rose to protest he lighted the pencil-thin tube and blew a perfect circle of neon blue smoke around her.
“You can’t do that in here. I’ll have you arrested…I’ll” But that was the last word from Miss Hurley. The blue halo burst open like a burgeoning oyster shell and then wrapped tightly around her until she and the smoke disappeared in a black flash.
A buzzing sound rose at the side of Linet’s head. “Good, and keep her caged,” he commanded. “She’ll be perfect for our torture squads. We’ve worn out the teams we built from our last visit here during their Inquisition. I’m sure our enemies will agree to anything after an hour with her kind, and the other HR beasts we’ve captured. Keep the crew away from them on the flight home. Remember our leader’s motto, “An hour with a bureaucrat is a dreadful torture.”
by submission | Nov 16, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“Everyone remembers their first time—the feel, shudder, anticipation, sweat and wonder if you would die in the middle of penetration.” Emanuel Mumford stared into Stacy Croft’s face, watching for twitches or blush.
“What was yours, Captain?” She moved closer, ensuring live audiences would miss nothing.
“It was a blue giant we can’t see from Earth. That’s not important, but watching fusion balls freeze in globular time warps, like blue goldfish suspended in a bowl…exhilarating.” Mumford held his hands out in a circle for emphasis.
“And core entry? The danger is always there, so you’ve told us. Didn’t we lose a ship ten years ago?” Emanuel’s neck reddened. His face paled.
“I’d just transferred from Atlantis. She was my first assignment. We didn’t have the experience then to detect nova predecessors. There were no Q-wave monitors. Three hundred brave men, women and children lost.” He paused and then turned hard into the camera. “But I’m here to tell you all tonight, all of you on Earth…we, the Collectors, love our system, our planets, and our home world. We worship our Sol. It is our God of nourishment and survival. Returning live plasma to Her center through interspatial transfer elevators has kept Her alive for millions of years, long after the rogue dwarf star threatened to rip Sol apart in the First Empire.”
“Glory be to the First Empire,” Stacy urged, looking back to the audience.
“Glory be,” Emanuel repeated.
“And the plasma tube you showed us yesterday…it’s so much like a snake or some giant parasite reaching into the heart of a star. Do you imagine the star feels pain?”
“Hardly,” Emanuel replied, smiling. “It has no more feeling than your camera or a piece of space junk. Our own Sol is not conscious, but that we make it so in our love for its light and power. No, I sense no remorse when the plasma vacuum begins transporting the raw materials back home.”
“There must be some star systems that are advanced enough to resist. Can you discuss that?”
The Captain paused, considering his oath regarding classified information. He had been briefed. “Yes, there have been some cases of resistance. When the residents finally realize we are not destroying their source, but rather just taking a small part, they usually accept and leave us alone. After all, we learned about this technology from those who first came to Sol, before the rogue dwarf arrived. They gave us this ability in exchange for our Sol’s offering, in case we would ever need to restore our beloved.”
She pressed, “But haven’t there been encounters that were violent?”
“Stacy, I’ve come here tonight to explain that we are seeking new crews and new defense force volunteers to join our space families. That means risking much for our home system, but it is our highest calling. That may mean defending our ships and our purpose. We will always seek the peaceful path, but we will not have our path broken.”
“Captain, one of our viewers has asked me to have the name of your ship explained. Can you help?”
“Yes. Once a Captain has served five years, he or she can rename their vessel. I chose Nosferatu because I love the ancient myth of the vampire; however, in our case, we do not harm the one from whom we feed. We bring life to the one we love. Blessed be our Sol.”
by submission | Nov 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Routine tapping of useless, dilated, vestigial nostrils against thick glass…perhaps a hope for release. Considering death, but they won’t allow that. Not now. I swim to the tank bottom, again, praying someone, once human, will join me. I remember land life.
Sheila glowed at Elephant Butte Lake. Not an oasis, but watering holes in the high desert are blessings. Dust devils trashed our blue tent. We saved gear that didn’t fly off. “Just for one night,” I kept telling her, convinced that moonrise over sparse mesquite and rabbit brush would be worthwhile. We rested by sleepy firelight as three visitors arrived.
My first response was to shoo them away, but Sheila was ever empathetic, always reaching to anyone like lost puppies. The two men were older than we were and rough. I knew the signs of biker gangs frequenting Albuquerque. My old man was a truck driver for the feds when they built Manzano Peak base. He warned me about felons. They gathered around us, the two bikers on either side of me, as their pet whore sat behind Sheila. It seemed odd, until she grabbed Sheila’s chest and covered her mouth. The bookcases beside me rushed in, but I swiveled past, heading for the tent where my dad’s pepper gun was stashed under sleeping bags. He warned me about the curse, the black inlaid handle made from a meteorite. “It will never wound,” he scolded, as he passed it to me days before his entry into hospice.
They were already on me as I rolled out the pistol. It happened in seconds. Two dead men lay face down in grit and sand. My feet automatically sped toward the fire. Sheila’s throat was slit open before her attacker charged me. After that, it was a blur. I remember horrifying photos at the trial. It didn’t matter Sheila was dead…it was what I did. “Such inhumanity requires the death penalty.” By then I had already been beaten twice and knifed in jail, until confined in solitaire. DARPA people visited a week later, beginning my watery journey.
What did I have to lose? Military medical volunteers wouldn’t face the gas chamber. Soon I was underground near Dulce. Researchers tested me, took blood, and held rigorous exams. In a month, I was escorted to a brightly lit room with panels of lights monitored on a far wall. Unchained and lifted into a hexagonal booth made of thick Plexiglas, I saw perforations on stainless steel flooring, while above a fan whirred. The observers adjusted instruments and then pulled a throttle bar. A turbulence of red, blue and black particles exploded upward, spinning throughout the containment. Minute shards struck, and then invaded. I collapsed into darkness from excruciating pain.
My waking was dreadful. There was no air. The doctors and nurses above me held a dripping intubation hose as I flopped helplessly, choking. “Better move him in now,” directed the doctor. “There won’t be time for an adjustment. They’ll either work or not, but open air will kill him.”
The nurses rolled me over a plastic sheet I struggled on, and into a horse-trough sized tank. It bubbled with oxygen feeds. I found instant relief, but shock, as my lungs failed. I panicked; sure of drowning…but no…I felt my throat oscillating gently. I reached up with webbed fingers to discover gills wafting fresh water over their red surfaces. That was the beginning—proof an aquanaut soldier could be developed. The beginning, only they know how long ago, as I age with my land memories in this crystal bowl, alone, but alive.
by submission | Nov 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Bismarck, North Dakota
Jimmy Severud prostrated his nine-year-old frame on the blooming stiff flax, undulating in cobalt waves from winds caressing North Dakota’s startling-blue spring sky. Nearby, summer whispered among meadowlark calls and cricket melodies. He imagined billowing alto cumulus clouds as pirate ships adrift from Montana, meandering above grain fields, but puffy ships violently pulled sails to become thin wisps, without warning, as rapid ribbons scooting past. Fields silenced. Jimmy twisted back in awe, gazing to a menacing three-hundred-foot misty giant hovering over the rolling prairies, consuming clouds into a semi-transparent behemoth.
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
“Observations are now worldwide. Thousands are being confirmed by satellite. These monsters appear without warning, craft or sound, devastating clouds. I want answers, gentlemen, and now. The President’s waiting.” The Joint Chiefs’ Chairman took no solace deep in the Rockies. Confronting threats this massive called for nuclear intervention.
“General,” Dr. Elmore Baker, climatologist, responded, “We’ve tried salting clouds with silver iodide and chem trails. No effect. They prefer cumulus, but yesterday one devoured a nimbostratus over Kansas, with tornado funnels forming. High winds and lightning had no impact. If they continue we’ll have worldwide droughts in a month.”
“What about you, Carlson? Any luck deciphering that scalar wave code? Are they communicating?” The Chairman leaned towards Dr. Carlson, Berkeley’s renowned linguist.
“General, we’ve tried every decryption code…every alphabet. There is a correlation with an ancient Iroquois dialect given to them by their tribe’s Sky Mother.”
“Yes…go on…go on,” the General interrupted, flapping his right hand at Carlson to get to the point.
“Not absolutely sure,” Carlson paused, “but we interpreted one phrase as Myrgdala thirsty.
“Thirsty? That’s it? I don’t care what they call themselves. It’s obvious they want water. Peterson, what’s DARPA got ready? Can we nuke these bastards?”
Analyst Gerard Peterson delayed, waiting for tensions to drop. “Options are limited.” He halted again to gather everyone’s attention. “Radiation won’t affect them. They don’t have enough solid substance. We have no idea what heat might do, but based on lightning stories, probably little. In fact, targeting them is not feasible. They come in and out of the atmosphere we believe through some inter-dimensional portal. They’re gone in minutes. We’d waste our arsenal. The Agency, however, does have practical options, but there may be collateral damage.”
“Peterson, the last one of your collateral risks cost us an aircraft carrier off North Korea. You better be sure this time.” Red filled the General’s neckline.
“We are already set to test the use of swarm nanobots. They can combine with tenuous matter like these gas giants. Clouds of intelligent, swarming particles will spread over them, uses the giant’s contents to reproduce, and then encase them in metallic mesh allowing us to drag them into space. We believe these beasts will perish before reaching the upper ionosphere.”
“Ready to launch, you say?”
“General, just say the word. We’re already in the Pacific, far from any land mass.”
“Do it. Do it now!”
The team monitored results on their war room screens. Rockets released swarms on a targeted giant northeast of Hawaii. In seconds, a black cloud circled and engaged the invader. Its arms and legs reflected with new mesh as the bots spread…but suddenly the metal disappeared. The casing of technology became flesh as the giants solidified. Carlson rushed to answer an emergency call from Berkeley.
“General,” Carlson shouted out. “Hundreds of them are mutating simultaneously worldwide into the new form and communicating with the scalar waves. My team has deciphered a new message. Oh, God!”
“What is it man? Speak up!”
“Our world. Hungry.”
