by Patricia Stewart | Aug 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Captain Goff sat at the head of the conference table. “Well, we find ourselves in a rather precarious situation. The Capellians have seized our ship, as well as the flagship of the Rana. They claim that our war with the Rana has violated their sovereign space. We have been tried, in absentia, in the Capellian Courts, and have been found guilty. According to the Judge, both vessels, including the crew, are to be destroyed. Fortunately for us, however, it appears that our court appointed counsel has done his homework. He appealed the sentence on the grounds of an ancient precedent. If both defendants concur, we can settle our current battle with a one-on-one contest to the death. The survivor’s ship is set free; the other is destroyed. Obviously, this option is better than the original ruling, so I assume the Rana will agree to the fight. What are your recommendations?â€
“Captain,†said the first officer, “this sounds like a bad plot from a twentieth century science fiction novel. Surely the Capellians are not serious. This is uncivilized.â€
“I’m afraid, Commander, that the Capellians are quite serious, and they have the technological superiority to carry out their sentence. Consider that aspect closed. My primary concern now is figuring out how we can best win the head-to-head conflict. As it stands, the Rana were permitted to choose the weapon. We get to pick the battlefield. Not surprisingly, the Rana chose hand-to-hand combat. I suppose if I had a two inch thick exoskeleton and weighed more than 1000 pounds, I’d choose hand-to-hand combat too. As for the battlefield, the Capellians will recreate any Earth topography we choose. I’m open to suggestions?â€
The science officer spoke. “Since the Rana come from an arid world, we need to avoid any rocky, desert terrain. I recommend a cold, icy location. Perhaps, the Siberian Tundra.â€
The captain replied, “Too risky. If I die of exposure before my opponent, the Rana will be declared the winner.â€
The security officer leaped from his seat. “What? With all due respect, sir, I should be the one fighting the Rana, not you.â€
“At ease, Lieutenant,†cautioned the Captain. “I’ll choose the appropriate member of the crew, after I select the most advantageous battlefield.â€
“How about a densely wooded area?†suggested the first officer. “They’re too big to maneuver. We’d have an advantage.â€
“I thought about that,†replied the captain. “But, it only buys time. Ultimately, I must kill it, or be very confident I can outlive it, which may be tough. I’m sure they require less food and water than we do.â€
The tactical discussion continued for several more hours, with no apparent solutions. Finally, an officer of the Capellian court materialized in the room and asked, “Your time is up captain. Have you chosen the battlefield?â€
“Yes I have. Let’s get this over with.†He stood up and joined the Capellian, and they both disappeared. The security cursed himself for being too slow to stop the captain from leaving.
Five minutes later, the captain reappeared, soaking wet from the neck down. “Prepare to jump to hyperspace,†he ordered, “before the Capellians change their mind.â€
Once the ship was safely away from the Capellian system, the captain relaxed. He turned to his first officer, “I selected the middle of Gulf of Mexico as the battlefield. I guessed correctly that a 1000 pound creature from a dry desert-like planet, didn’t know how to swim.â€
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by submission | Aug 16, 2007 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
Dawn’s light angled off the blank brick walls of the narrow alley. The air shimmered, then expanded like a large soap bubble and softly popped. Iyo stood there for a moment to orientate herself. She glanced up and around. No windows. Bioforms reading only insects and the odd rodent.
“Clear,†she said to no one in particular.
She was flying solo. It would have been nice to have her old unit along, but explaining away a squad of heavily armed Shan dog troopers, five foot canine humanoids, or Corporal Jax, a three quarter ton Marine cyborg, well, the locals might get nervous.
So, Iyo stood in this alley alone, a tall blonde in jeans and a leather jacket. The air reeked of hydrocarbons and decay. The nanites in her lungs and blood were already working hard to offset their effects.
“You’ll get used to it,†she thought, like the dank, moldy air in the catacombs of that scathole Trobathney back…â€or forward?†she mused. Transtemporal/Paratemporal operations were still new enough to have not worked out the tenses of their grammatic descriptors.
“Your cover is Camilla Göteborg. You’re a model from Sweden,†her Case Officer said. “Remember, this line is swarming with unmodified males. Refrain from killing them unless you have absolutely no choice.â€
Iyo knew all that from the compressed immersion vert. This was just her Real Time cover activation. She also knew she was picked because she looked more like the locals than her mostly dark and therefor potentially ‘exotic’ Sisters.
Not mentioned in the vert briefing was the underlaying reason for this mission. The tactical rationals were addressed in detail. The strategic concepts were clear. The socio-cultural purposes were left unspoken.
Iyo knew them, however. She was only one of hundreds of millions of Sisters who had been born into, and had grown up to fight, The War. It was always there, generation after generation. Once, The Enemy had threatened The Sisterhood with extinction. Now, Victory was almost assured and The War was slowly winding down.
What to do with all these battle hardened warriors?
Retrain them in covert operations and ship them out across all of Creation was the plan The Elders of The Sisterhood devised. Iyo actually thought that a good idea. She knew she’d get into mischief in peacetime and the necessities of ‘blending in’ would help her readjust to non-martial society.
Thus, she found herself in place called Brooklyn.
“Okay, enough woolgathering,†she said using local colloquialisms.
She strode out of the alley, though quaint asphalt and concrete streets, to a promenade overlooking the city’s harbor. The water smelled even worse than the air, but the skyline of the tightly packed urban island across that water held a chaotic beauty.
She knew one of the two ugly boxlike towers that dominated that skyline would be destroyed in the Father/God wars that plagued this period. But that was nearly two decades…’up the line’. Maybe.
“Things change,†she murmured.
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by submission | Aug 15, 2007 | Story
Author : J. S. Kachelries
The Gossamer Comet hung motionless 10 meters beyond the Folkestone Colony’s outermost habitation “wheel.†The Gossamer Comet was a one-man “human-powered†spacecraft that was about to attempt to win the last unclaimed Kremer Prize, a £100,000 award for the first person to “fly†unaided, in less than twelve hours, between any two of the 247 space colonies in geostationary orbit.
Generally, all of the attempts to make the human-powered crossing involved Newton’s third law. Contestants would typically launch massive projectiles using a human compressed spring in one direction, and the ship would move in the opposite direction at a velocity proportional to the mass of the projectiles and the ship. Alternatively, contestants would use a hand pump to pressurize a liquid, and release it like a rocket exhaust. The big problem, however, was achieving the correct trajectory. In orbit, there were complicating factors. If the ship moves retrograde (opposite to the direction of Earth’s rotation) its orbital velocity decreases. This means that it is no longer in geostationary orbit, and it starts to “fall†perceptibly toward the Earth. Consequently, after traveling several hundred kilometers, it misses the target low. Some intrepid designers added multidirectional “guidance†capability to their ships. But all those craft ended up rotating helplessly out of control (the rules prohibited gyroscopes on the ship). In over twenty years of trying, nobody had been able to “thread the needle†(i.e., achieve the correct angle and velocity to dock successfully with an adjacent space colony).
But today, Allen Bryan, a 25-year-old graduate student in Physics, had a plan to improve his odds. He had spent months preparing for this attempt. Seconds after he was notified that the twelve-hour time limit had begun, he exited a hatch and clipped a tether line to his spacesuit. He then began turning a winch that caused a circular hull plate to move inside his ship. He climbed into the newly created cavity, and satisfied that he was aimed correctly, released the preloaded spring. As shocked onlookers watched, Bryan launched his body at an angle slightly outboard of the Gris-Nez Station, which was 358 kilometers “behind†the Folkestone. Of course, his more massive ship moved slowly in the opposite direction. Bryan had meticulously controlled the mass of the ship, the tether line, and his own mass. As he flew on a trajectory outboard of the Gris-Nez, he began to drop toward the Earth because of his retrograde motion. His plan was to overshoot the Gris-Nez, but cross its orbit five to ten kilometers on the far side. After eight hours of flight, the 500-kilometer long Kevlar tether line had played out. Bryan was safely beyond, and below, the Gris-Nez, with his tether line “draped†across the outer wheel of the space station. Bryan began to feverishly crank the winch on his spacesuit to reel himself in. He continued to shorten the tether line until he lightly crashed into the Gris-Nez colony two hours later. Exhausted, he scrambled into an open cargo bay.
“Very clever, Mister Bryan,†said a member of the Royal Aerospace Society’s Human-Powered Spacecraft Rules Committee, “that technique significantly increased your margin of error. Very clever, indeed. However, the rules clearly stipulate that ‘the pilot and the ship’ must arrive at the space station to claim the £100,000 prize. I suggest, sir, that you get busy manually hauling in your ship. You only have two hours left on the clock.â€
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by B. York | Aug 14, 2007 | Story
Author : B.York, Staff Writer
Tommy Texas was born in Sienna where his ma and his pa taught him to thank others for the luxuries they had. They thanked Peter for the ability to cook; they thanked Kimberly for the ride into town, and they thanked their grandpa Jeremiah for the television shows they watched each and every night.
In Sienna, Tommy Texas was loved by everyone. Tommy was loved because he had a big family and everyone there loved big families. All the townsfolk knew that more people meant they could have more luxuries and so Tommy Texas was someone they liked to see very much.
When Tommy got older, his parents wanted him to be a police officer but Tommy worked in construction anyways. He thanked Delilah’s father Robert for letting him use the lift and the vehicles to do his job each and every day. Tommy helped build the city bigger so that more would come to live in it. He knew that would make others happy to have more people in town.
As time went by, Tommy wanted to go to college far off but his ma and pa told him it would be a waste for him to leave town and surely the townsfolk would never be happy about anyone leaving the town. So, to be fair to his parents, Tommy stayed in the town of Sienna where he went to school and thanked Fred’s brother Ian for the ride over to school each and every day.
While Tommy was at college he met a girl named Felicia in one of his classes. Tommy and Felicia loved each other very much and eventually the two got married. The town was so happy that they got married because Felicia came from a big family, too. Her grandfather was the first one to thank for the lights at the town hall so that made Felicia’s family famous.
During the wedding, the pastor thanked Felicia and Tommy for getting married and wished on them a big and happy family. He also thanked a few people for the ceremony and then let Felicia and Tommy kiss so they could go off and have a family.
As the years went by, Tommy and Felicia had many children and so the townsfolk lavished them with gifts and thanked them for everything they were doing for the town. Tommy and Felicia were happy to have so many children- it made them feel blessed. They thanked Tommy’s parents for the house they lived in and also the cool air during the summer seasons.
Tommy and Felicia’s children grew up quick and they, too, learned to thank others for the things they had. They thanked grandpa and grandma for the cool air and the house they lived in each and every day.
Though one day years later Tommy got sick and died in the winter. Felicia was sad for bit and so were the children who were much older now. The town had a big celebration in Tommy’s name and they even brought the celebration to the plant where they liquidated his body.
Now all the boys and girls in Sienna thank Tommy Texas for heating the school in the winter. They learned to thank others for the luxuries they had and knew that someday someone would be thanking them, too.
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by Kathy Kachelries | Aug 13, 2007 | Story
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
It was a no-call assignment, and Carson hated no-call assignments. Attempts to contact the McCaulty family through conventional mail had been unsuccessful, though he noted that the lever of the mailbox had been raised, indicating recent use. They had no telephone, of course. Carson shifted the car to manual control as they left the grid and pulled onto the gravel trail.
“Are those real cows?” Kristin asked. He nodded. Her eyes were wide.
“You’ll get used to it. Is your defo shield charged?” he asked. The car came to a stop behind a rusted-out manual pickup truck, and Carson yanked on the emergency brake. Kristin nodded and followed him up the gravel path and he looked her over one last time before ringing the doorbell.
Long seconds passed before the door swung open a few inches, and a portly woman ran her eyes over the two of them. “Are you Mrs. McCaulty?” Carson asked as he flipped open his wallet. His badge caught the light and projected a holographic image of his face.
“I got no business with you.”
“We’re here to discuss your son.”
Mrs. McCaulty squinted suspiciously. “There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”
“Then you won’t mind us asking him a few questions.”
“He don’t talk yet.”
Carson reached for his report pad and scrolled through the relevant information. “He’s nearly five, correct?” he asked as he moved his foot into the crack between the door and its frame. “We’re just gathering information about the case.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”
“Are you familiar with the Re-Ability program?”
“You’re not sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she said, this time with an edge of force. Mrs. McCaulty leaned against the door, but Carson didn’t let it close.
“I think you might be misinterpreting this visit,” he said. “I’m here to tell you about the federal assistance program. Your son may qualify for-”
“You ain’t sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she repeated.
Carson revealed no evidence of frustration or unease, though Kristin had tucked herself behind him with a nervous expression across her youthful face. “Re-Ability implants are no different from pacemakers or any other medical device,” he said calmly. “If he’s struggling, there’s a solution. Surely, as his mother, you’d want him to have the best life possible.”
“You ain’t-”
“I’ll just leave you with this information,” Carson said. His hand slid through the crack in the door, holding a bouquet of holo-readers. She snatched them from his grip, and he barely retrieved his hand before the door snapped shut. Carson’s frown was almost invisible as he turned back to the car.
“She isn’t going to read those,” Kristin said as she grabbed the door handle.
“You’re learning fast.”
“So what do we do?”
He slid into his padded seat and yanked the door shut with a little more force than necessary. “Level two,” he said. “Forward it under neglect and endangerment.”
Kristin gave a short nod as she slid in and pulled her door closed. “Are they going to-”
“If he doesn’t have that implant before he’s six, he’ll be permanently delayed.” Carson snapped as he threw the car back into manual and it spun. “Don’t feel sorry for her. He needs treatment.”
“Alright,” Kristin said. Her voice was meek as she reached for the console panel.
“Label it priority,” he added. The car jerked abruptly as it reached the end of the driveway and reunited with the grid.
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