by Patricia Stewart | Mar 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Judge yawned as he seated himself at the bench. “What are we doing here, Mike?” he asked the bailiff.
“Your Honor, we are hearing the civil case of ‘Captain Taylor versus Solar System Transportation, Inc.’, a dispute over wages due for a cargo run from Earth Station Tango to Alpha Centauri base.”
“Fine,” replied the Judge as he turned to address the plaintiff. “What’s your claim, son?”
“Your Honor, I left Earth in 2248. It was SST’s first interstellar commercial payload, and because of the hardships, they agreed to pay me a bonus of 100,000 credits per year. I returned eleven years later, in 2259. Therefore, they owe me an extra 1,100,000 credits.”
“Sounds straightforward,” noted the Judge. “So,” he continued as he addressed the defendant, “why haven’t you paid the man?”
“Simple relativity, Your Honor. Due to time dilation during the 0.95c portion of the trip, Captain Taylor only aged three years. Therefore, we are only obligated to pay him an extra 300,000 credits.”
Damn, thought the Judge to himself, time dilation makes my head ache. Why can’t these lawyers foresee these types of issues and make provisions up front. All this ambiguity was begging for litigation. “Okay,” he lamented, “let me see the contract. Court is adjourned until this time tomorrow.”
The following day, the Judge resumed his position at the bench. Without preamble, he announced, “I find for the plaintiff. However, the award will not be 1.1 million credits. It seems that in section 102, paragraph 22, the contract stipulated the adherence to the Space Transportation Act of 2203. Apparently, it’s one of the older Acts written to protect non-union pilots from disreputable transportation companies. It states that pilots must be compensated 60 credits per shift hour, or 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, whichever is higher. Therefore, at the hourly rate, the six month, or 1244 shift hours, round trip to Titan would pay 74,640 credits. On the other hand, based on the distance traveled rate, the 1.486 billion miles round trip would pay only 37,480 credits. For decades, the hourly rate was the only one that mattered, since the spaceships of the era traveled so slowly. However, when star ships were developed, no one at SST thought about updating the terms of their standard contract.” The Judge grinned as he looked the CEO of Solar System Transportation, Inc. and his panel of high paid attorneys. “You see where this is going, I suppose?”
The CEO became pale and his eyes rolled upward as he fainted, toppling over his chair.
“Ah, I see you do,” remarked the Judge with a smile. “At the rate of 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, I rule for the plaintiff the sum of 1.32 billion credits for the 52.5 trillion mile round trip to Alpha Centauri. ”
by Duncan Shields | Mar 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to create a mantle. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.
The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It warped all sense of perspective.
We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant mile-wide suction cups.
Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.
As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my exolegs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.
“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.
“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight to help him relax.
I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.
The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.
If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.
Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.
Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.
I got out of the elevator surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few seconds calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.
My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate’s HUD display and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Alumnus
I stood over him. His blood made a growing pool as it exited the wound in his back. The ounce slug of lead had gone all the way through. He looked up at me with crazed eyes. He raised his hands to me. He tried to speak, but choked on pink, foamy slime, evidence that his lungs were shredded. For one brief moment he achieved clarity. His eyes steadied. I think he smiled before he died.
When he woke up that morning, he didn’t know he was going to die. He probably had plans for the day. Perhaps a dinner date. Maybe he still had a father somewhere that used to take him fishing. A father that would mourn him. Someone who loved him.
I guess I should have felt something. Something at the death of a fellow human being. I felt nothing but revulsion. He knew the law. He knew the penalty for his actions. For his disgusting behaviour. For his loathsome ways. There were no innocent parties. I slipped the Mossberg back into the sheath strapped to my thigh and climbed back in the growler.
As we left the scene I called for a meat wagon to pick up what was left of the human flotsam. Before I closed the door, I took one last look down at the black and white caricature of a human being below me. The tragic figure seemed to spin slowly as we spiraled up into the traffic pattern. I must have been looking down longer than I thought. My partner, Sergeant Ray Chavez, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at his throat mike. I tapped my temple and activated my earwig. His voice came through loud and strong despite the rush of air from the open door.
“Hey buddy, what’s up? You seem a little quiet today.”
I had to put all my weight against the door to pull it down and shut. I sat for a moment thinking about his seemingly innocuous question. “Just thinking,” I said.
“Yeah? What about?”
I considered his question. I thought of the body lying there on the pavement a thousand feet below. The curled lips caught in the gruesome rictus of death. The twisted body. The face and features contorted, resembling a bizarre, nightmarish image caught in the black and white photograph of a bygone era.
“I was just thinking,” I said when I finally spoke, “how much I fucking hate mimes.”
by Clint Wilson | Mar 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
As they lowered into a spot outside the arena and Jeremy’s father shut the hove’s engines down he continued to give his son the pep talk. “A year enslavement. Do you even know what that means? Of course you don’t,” he answered himself. “You haven’t ever had it tough, haven’t ever lost a playoff series, haven’t had to go live in a place where everyone hated you and picked on you and abused you every chance they got.”
“Yeah, I know dad,” he answered as he procured his hockey bag and sticks from the hove’s luggage bay. “Don’t worry, we’ll beat these guys.”
“Well you’d better, is all I can say. Me and some of the other dads need at least half those kids in the factory by morning if we’re going to make our quota. And god forbid, if you lose? I don’t even want to think about that!”
“We’re not going to lose dad. I’ll be home safe tonight.”
Suddenly Jeremy’s mother appeared with his little sister. They had been waiting at the arena entrance. Both had tears in their eyes.
“Oh baby,” Jeremy’s mother cried, “I hate playoffs so much.”
As the game progressed things got heated in the stands as well as on the ice. Parents from both sides hurled insults and expletives at each other as their children skated their hearts out in one of the roughest and most hard fought playoff finals in the junior league’s history.
And in the end, the ten to one underdog Mooseport Rockets scored a dramatic overtime goal to trounce their richer, better coached and far better fed rivals from Upper Eastplane.
And as mother, father and daughter huddled in tears amongst the other crying families in their bleacher section, the heavily armed on-ice officials escorted the losing team to the far end of the arena.
“My baby! My baby boy!” cried Jeremy’s mother over and over, while his father wondered worriedly how he was going to continue to deal with the labor shortages at the factory.
The Upper Eastplane Eagles weren’t even allowed to change out of their gear as they were taken, skates and all, to the waiting prison transport. Jeremy gulped. He heard they had some god awful sweat shops in Mooseport. Why oh why hadn’t he just skated a little harder?
by Julian Miles | Mar 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“The view from here is mighty fine, it sends a shiver up my spine.”
I laugh at Kara’s ditty as it arrives. Nothing but the truth, even out here. My suit keeps me spread-eagled on the side of cannon four as it thunders along with its seven brothers, sending the Espiritu de Sanctii further from the remains of my home.
“How’s things, big guy?”
“Sweet as, babe. Just hanging around waiting for the boys. Good view, rockin’ rhythm, best seat in the house.”
Canopus fades from view in the drive-flare as I finish my sentence. I had been top ganger at Wenceslas Station, the only man for the tricky job of checking the fuel couplings on the Vatican flagship. It had all been going well until a distress call from a convoy activated the ‘expedite rescue’ sequence. Not one of the holy orders had thought to obey the procedures for hard-lock maintenance, so the ship had obeyed the clarion call and lit out to the rescue at emergency speed while the crew got their asses in gear.
Wenceslas Station had taken a level two decompression when the ship tore loose. They were just scrambling to contain that major atmosphere breach when the station took the brunt of a full-bore eight cannon overburn. I watched in numb horror as eight thousand people died in a chain detonation that scattered fiery pearls across Canopian space. The ship did not deviate from its path.
I had just finished checking cannon four when the burn started. The violent lurch activated my failsafe magnetics, which combined with the fact that I was standing at ninety degrees to the thrust vector meant I slammed down onto the hull over drive number four that had been beneath my feet. My safety array became a prison. While we continued to move and the station beacon was not found, the array kept me stuck like a barnacle to a keel. Kara is forward and half a rotation separated from me. She had been in the tube between airlocks when it happened. Her magnetics had plastered her face down mere metres from the ship’s airlock.
“Dave, what are we going to do about this?”
“Tell your suit to seek supplementary power to maintain emergency state. It should probe and find an external maintenance panel to get you juice and goop.”
“Done that. What next?”
“Tell your suit to ready emergency hibernation measures with realspace restart.”
“Actioned. Why?”
“Because at some point this bastard is going to dive.”
Dive being slang for entering drivespace. Consciousness cannot not tolerate that without experiencing sanity’s equivalent of a blancmange being hit by a sledgehammer. Driveships have suppressor fields to stop crew meltdown. Those fields are for internal passengers only.
“Oh crap.”
“Not a problem. We get to doze for a bit and wake up somewhere new.”
“Sure?”
“Promise. Plus we get to be famous.”
“Why would we – ”
Reality tore into spinning curtains of impossible colours and my suit reacted just fast enough. The lights went out.
*
“Dave!”
My mouth tasted like the green greeblie from the back of beyond had done something unspeakable in it. The lights were too bright and I had a pounding headache.
“Quietly, woman.”
Kara whispered: “Why would we be famous?”
I looked about the medical suite. There were several people in Canopian Ranger uniforms standing around with witness recorders. I grinned at Kara.
“Because no-one has ever survived doing something that insanely stupid.”
She hit me hard and low. Apparently she only kissed me after I had passed out, the rotten cow.
