by submission | Jun 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steven Journey
I watched her sleep as I cradled the gun, pausing only to wipe the silent tears rolling down my cheek.
We had made a pact last night, a deeper pact than even our wedding vows had been many years ago. I was about to betray that pack.
I stared out at the desolate landscape. Nothing to see for miles and miles, apart from the six mounds marking the shallow graves of our crew, and the remains of our spacecraft. They were the lucky ones. When our spacecraft malfunctioned during entry into the atmosphere, only I and Lucinda survived. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
We were here to mine ice. Well, the mining would be done by the drilling crew, but we first had to build the support structures to house the drills that would arrive in a couple of days. Now we waited for the crew to arrive, and with them the extra oxygen tanks we required. Ours had exploded upon impact, and all that was left was the ones on our backs, which would run out today, and one that had somehow survived the landing.
It wasn’t enough for us both, but one of us could survive until the drilling crew arrived. We had both offered to give our lives for the other, but neither could accept the offer. In the end, we agreed we would die together.
It was a surprisingly short discussion, when you consider the gravity of the situation.
I hadn’t slept. Lucinda seemed to have found peace in our pact, and was sleeping deeply.
During the night, I had realised that our decision, whilst being the only reasonable one we could come to together, was ridiculous. But if I made the decision on my own, then one of us could live.
As I loaded the gun, I wondered if it would hurt, or if death would be instantaneous.
I raised the gun, and took one last look at my sleeping wife.
I pulled the trigger.
As I crawled towards the spare oxygen tank, I wept.
by Julian Miles | Jun 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Even before everything came apart, I hated hills. And, back then, I had gears. This old clunker only has one cog at each end. So there’s nothing for it but to push down on one side while hooking the other side under the pedal to pull up. If that isn’t enough, it’s time to walk.
Which is a bit of a bugger with forty kilos of scavenged stuff in the panniers. Then again, I’m going back to Racehill Fort, where sanity still exists. I have three people with me, and we chat about things and laugh as we go. Most of the south coast is a feral wasteland. If pedalling harder is the tariff for being part of civilisation, I’ll happily do it.
“Chargers!” Cindy’s cry is hoarse with fear.
Damn and blast. I’d hoped that the new equivalent of mechanised cavalry hadn’t spread this far. Should have guessed it – electric motors do good work on smooth going, but off roads, they’re shite. The mountain bikers, foresters and horsefolk make short work of them. Which means they are bound to the roads, and roads delimit the old urban territories. Like the one we live in.
“Push on! There’s a dip we can use to help with the long up to the fort!”
True enough, but the sounds I’m hearing are not servo-driven bicycle tyres. They sound like –
A black-helmeted rider shoots from a side road, his e-motorbike sporting armoured fairings, spiked leg guards, and a pillion with a hand crossbow.
“Stand and deliver!”
You can hear the amusement in the bastard’s voice: he’s enjoying this.
I raise my hands: “We’ve not got much, just some canned goods.”
He points at me: “Dump it all.”
We do so.
Pillion dismounts and stretches with a groan. Unlike the compact frame of the rider, this one’s a bit of a monster. I note that the crossbow does not waver while the stretch and audible bone cracking occurs.
After the stretch, he waves the hand that doesn’t hold the crossbow as he speaks: “Here’s how it goes, kids. You’ll not be scavenging anything until our conditions are met.”
Mark’s face betrays his bafflement: “What?”
Rider shakes his head: “If you leave the fort to get stuff, we will stop you on the way back. Every time. If you keep trying, we’ll slash your tyres.”
We are faced with a man who knows his threats.
I raise my arms: “What conditions?”
There is no hesitation: “Vegetables.”
Mark beats me to it: “What?”
Linda gets it: “You’ve lost your farmer, haven’t you?”
The rider laughs: “Good guess. So, here’s how it goes. We want fresh veg, and you grow loads up there. But you need people who do the brute force thing. We’ve watched you, and you’re either shit at it, too squeamish, or both. We are very good at violence -”
Linda interrupts with: “But shit at gardening.”
Pillion grins and stops pointing the crossbow at us: “You’d be right, lady.”
I start pushing my bike: “You wouldn’t happen to have any bicycle sized motors would you?”
Rider scratches under his helmet: “The sort that helps pushbikes up hills? I’m sure we could find some.”
“Then I think you’ll be welcomed with open arms. Providing you bring the gear to fit ‘em as well.”
Both of our erstwhile highwaymen burst out laughing, and I know an alliance has been formed.
by submission | Jun 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : Richard Day Gore
“Lover, question the Question.”
My Karala was like that. She spoke in riddles. Her thoughts were a maze designed so that only she could extract their meaning. But she was no match for the Gods, and their voracious hunger for our gold.
Why do the Gods need gold? Feeding their sky-chariots with the yellow metal has been our reason to exist since before the Bal-Kari, before the First Sweeping of the Tells. We’re taught not to question, only to do. To dig it from the rocks and mountains the Gods gave us, to extract and refine it in the fire they bestowed on our ancestors as reward for pledging their progeny—us—to the slavery of mindless worship.
Several Gods arrive today, their heavenly vehicles swathed in pulsating light that pierces the eyes and makes us bow our heads. It’s only after they dismount from within their chariots that we can glimpse them, if we dare. Grey and scaly like night-lizards, without the organized form of skeletons like we humans have. They have no faces, no arms to reach us, nor fists to strike us. Instead they are surrounded with a pale, glowing sphere of energy that prickles the flesh like a flood of stinging nettles, that pierces us without bleeding, that plants in us the single, inescapable thought that overrides all others: Obey.
That I do today, even as my heart collapses into its own emptiness. Karala. Karala! Her name crashes through my mind, battling with the specter of fear and obedience that keeps me shackled with my brothers to this wicker basket. To the fire. Then back for more. Endless toil under a sun as hot as our furnace, until night delivers us to sleep, to forbidden dreams.
Karala was my dream since we were children. But after we gave birth to a new gold-finder, the Gods took Karala from me. Because she questioned. Not even Karala, with her strong mind and stronger will, could keep the invisible nettle-sphere from penetrating her and extracting her thoughts.
So now, as one chariot departs in a searing flash, and another lands in a thick cloud of dust, I try to cloak my thoughts within my memory of her, and carry on carrying. Respeth, who crushes boulders on a massive anvil… Badomash, who spills the mountain of pebbles into the furnace… The Gods took their wives away. Like Karala, their mates questioned: Why do the Gods need gold? We see it in each other’s eyes, furtive glimpses only—dangerous gazes carefully withheld. Meeting each other’s eyes would draw the question from our minds, where it would be intercepted, and we would perish like our women.
So I struggle without and within, spine and limbs twisted by the weight of this basket, and try not to think of Karala and her riddle. But I must.
“Lover, question the Question.”
And it’s now, as I tip the basket towards Respeth’s anvil, that the swirl of words congeals into something resembling deliverance. Yes, my Karala, I honor you by questioning the question, Why do the Gods need gold? And within it is the germ of the solution…
If they are really gods, how is possible that they would need anything? Suddenly, the answer rockets through my mind:
Because they are not gods.
An exaltation of power courses through me. Suddenly, my weariness vanishes as I lock eyes with Respeth and Badomash. The words, the Answer, burst up my throat. My lips form around them and begin to speak.
A flash of light washes over us. The nettles envelop me.
My Karala, I am coming!
by submission | Jun 8, 2016 | Story |
Author : Terry J. Golob
Completely naked, sinking slowly into the murky depths, I know these things:
One. Our attack failed.
Two. I am a prisoner of the Katal-Kuar-Eye.
Three. The tiny dead things floating in here with me, that wispy strand of flotsam, that bony crag of jetsam, aren’t dead; they’re interrogators for the Katal-Kuar-Eye. At my slightest movement they will bore into my flesh and chew their way painfully through my neural pathways and consume my every living memory. Not fully satiated they will then devour the rest of my brain and body. My bones will clatter at the bottom of this enormous flooded chamber with the rest of my battalion.
Four. No one has ever escaped alive.
Five. I was trained for this.
It is an exercise in complete restraint. Repeating my mantra only in my mind, “delay” is the one word that anchors my corpse to its motionless state. To even blink or move my eye is to die. Fortunately the viscosity of the liquid matches my tear ducts; thus, blinking is unnecessary. Swathed in thin black mucus upon splashdown, the veil dissolves and my eyes remain unmoving and open, bared to see the horrors of the flotsam and jetsam. A single blink and my comrade’s eyes are bored out in crimson flailing billows. Mortis reflex: limbs spasm as their minds are devoured. Delay. An endless rain of skulls, clavicles, spinal columns, and tibias drop through my field of vision. The bones falling close to me still have dangles of pink meat and cartilage.
Six. No one has gotten this far before.
I land on my stomach atop a mountain of bones overlooking a pink shrouded valley. A ribcage punctures my torso and a scapula cuts into the soft flesh behind my knee. Upon another bony hillock, face up, is a blond little girl, eyes wide, motionless. Other skeletons are piling on top of her like they are piling on top of me. Her blond hair undulates in gentle waves. I see her pale green eyes. I imagine she can see mine. This little girl has nerves of steel. I wonder what her mantra is? Then I see the tendrils, thin black eels rising from the blood cloud, stripping the bones of flesh and cartilage: snaking their way towards the both of us. One. Two. Three. They strike her tiny body. She grimaces and the flotsam and jetsam move in. Eyes replaced by red fog, which in moments, a current gently sweeps away revealing the tiny sockets in her empty little skull. Delay. Steel is my resolve. I get ready for pain, hear them gnawing on flesh and sinew close to me. They strike: chewing into my calves, chest, neck, cheek and wrist – disappearing inside me. At the bottom of the crimson valley a tight blue sphincter glows, then opens, sucking in liquid and bones. Skeletal collisions rattle above and below as suction draws everything down. Delay. Nobody has ever seen this before. Crammed into a narrow crevice, I watch the blue sphincter circle; then close. Darkness. Bone Crusher. End of Transmission
by submission | Jun 7, 2016 | Story |
Author : Michael F. da Silva
The siege lasted two years and we were about ready to throw in the towel by then.
We had no air support, had been pushed back to the fortified bunkers all the way from the enemy’s beachheads and under heavy shelling. It was taking a toll on our morale. Not only that, but the last we heard from GalCom said that fourteen other incursions had been made all over Human space. FUBAR, as the expression went.
Local command tried to keep our spirits up by keeping up a steady trickle of low-scale sallies. When Espareth ships were too far off on the other side of the planet for close air support, we’d hit their ground forces with everything we had and charged them fast enough for blade work. We made good advantage of the hardened tunnel systems for that. Something GalCom got from the history books about static defence and asymmetric warfare.
Near the end though, we were about done. We were low on ammunition and able bodies. The civil engineers were holding the water replenishment systems together with spit and baling wire. There were a few cases of dysentery whose rumours couldn’t be quashed before some of the civilian authorities started to push for surrender. I have to hand it to Colonel Abrahamson. That man was a rock for the duration.
And you can bet he was just as glad as anyone else when a relief task force broke through. The Espareth had spread their forces too far too fast across Human territory and their contain-and-invest strategy hadn’t worked as well as they had hoped.
I was right there with the mechanised infantry brigades when the blast doors opened outward fifty clicks Northeast of New Lisbon. Colonel Abrahamson was the age-old avatar of chivalric glory as he carried the sky-blue banner over the crest himself in his own gauntleted hands.
We pay homage now, assembled in full regalia in front of that same gate, two years later. The military band plays solemn tune as the banners sway in the breeze in front of the Abrahamson Cenotaph. He fell in that final battle that annihilated the remnants of the invasion force. His was the death to which every great soldier aspires; in victorious battle.
There is popular support for renaming this rock after the Colonel. Worlds should be named for those who sacrificed the most to build them, people say. No matter what the Colonial Office says, we will always know this is Abrahamson’s World.
