by Patricia Stewart | Oct 6, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The regiment’s remaining survivors set up a parameter around their crashed transport ship. “Lieutenant Colonel,” called out Corporal Kuroki as he climbed over the twisted remains of a cargo hold bulkhead. “Colonel Searcy is dead too, sir. Looks like you’re the CO.”
“Understood,” replied Bourke. “Do you know if the pilots got out a distress call?”
“They did, sir. But the ETA for evac is 15 days. We have enough food, but the transport’s water tank ruptured on impact. We only have enough potable water for a couple of days.”
“That shouldn’t be too big a problem, Corporal. This may be an arid planet, but I can see an oasis in the distance. It can’t be more that a couple of klicks from here.”
“Yes, sir. But according to the planetary briefs, the oases on Inculta are all guarded by an unidentified apex predator. It is strongly recommended that they not be entered.”
“Need I remind you, mister, that we are United Earth Marines? We are the galaxy’s ultimate apex predator. Now, take a squad and recon the oasis and report back.”
***
Several hours later, Lance Corporal Swensholm approached Bourke. “Sir,” she said, “Corporal Kuroki reported in. He said he found a small lake in the center of the oasis. Then we lost contact. I haven’t been able to raise anyone in his squad.”
Getting more angry than concerned, he said “Instruct Sergeant First Class Craddock to take a phaser platoon to the oasis and burn a thirty meter wide path to the lake. Tell him to locate Kuroki’s squad and secure access to the lake using whatever force he deems necessary. And just to cover all the bases, have the maintenance engineers uncrate a few Samson Assault Vehicles and stage them just outside the oasis.”
***
The following morning, Bourke stood in the open turret hatch of a Mark III Samson. He surveyed the still smoldering path that his platoon has scorched through the dense overgrowth of the oasis. He could see the glistening lake less than a kilometer away. “Still no contact with Kuroki’s or Craddock’s teams?” he asked.
“No, sir,” replied Swensholm. “It’s like they simply vanished. Sir, do you really think there’s an apex predator in there?”
“Unsure, Swensholm, but I’m going to find out.” With Bourke in the lead Samson, the three assault vehicles began to move single file down the center of the newly created path. As the Samsons lumbered toward the lake, the rapidly rotating proximity sensors scanned the nearby vegetation for any evidence of alien creatures. The radar controlled pulse cannons were set to automatically discharge at the first sign of any predator more that 50% larger than a human being. When the vehicles pulled up to the lake, Bourke spotted a dozen soldiers lying on the ground. He drew his hand phaser and swept a 360 degree arc, looking for something to shoot at. To his disappointment, he saw nothing. He climbed down from the Samson and approached his fallen men. Although their body armor was unscathed, there was nothing left of his men but skeletons, as though their flesh had been consumed by acid. One soldier lay on his back, his hollow eye sockets staring upward. Suddenly, a stabbing pain shot up Bourke right arm. He instinctively slapped at a mosquito-like insect on his right hand. Unaffected by the blow, the insect continued walking toward his forearm. “What the Hell?” He was dead before his body hit the ground.
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 5, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tom fished through the basket of coffee pucks until he found one marked simply ‘Columbian’.
“Got a thing against coffee flavoured coffee do you Sam?” He couldn’t see his friend through the glare of the flood lamps, but he could hear him shuffling around in the shadows. “Sure I can’t make you one?” He lifted the lid on the battered stainless coffee machine, inserted the puck and picked through the assortment of mugs while the heater primed.
“No. I can’t…” Sam’s voice was different, deeper. “don’t want to mess with stimulants just yet.”
Tom laughed, slamming the lid and punching the button to begin brewing.
“When have you ever been one to not take anything?”
With a sharp click one end of the loft space became bathed in the cold glow of hanging sodium lights. Sam stood beneath the harsh glare and dropped the switch box to let it swing by its wire from the ceiling.
Tom forgot all about his coffee.
“Since I got here, Tom, this is what I wanted to show you.”
Tom’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he moved away from the makeshift kitchenette in the middle of the room to the open space where his friend now stood.
“Christ Sam, what the hell did you do?”
Sam stood, clad only in surfer shorts, his skin glistening chameleochrome over rippling chorded muscle. He’d become a caricature of the man Tom had known before. His hair was gone, his feet larger and more solid than Tom remembered from all the summers they’d barefooted at his uncle’s cottage. His hands, too, seemed larger, the fingers elongated and sinewy.
“I’ve changed, Tom. I’ve taken everything I’ve studied, everything I’ve worked with in genetics, biomech, nano-tech and kinetic design and applied it to building a better me.” He smiled at this, revealing powerful looking teeth punctuated by gleaming fangs, wickedly curved and cat-like.
“Watch.”
Sam crouched, flattening himself almost to the floor, his legs coiled beneath him like springs and then erupted towards the ceiling, crossing the distance in a blink to hang, one handed from the steel structure twenty meters above his head. Noiselessly he swung his feet up and braced himself between two rows of girders, then spider crawled at alarming speed across the ceiling to the darkness at the far end of the room. Tom watched awestruck as Sam dropped to the floor and literally bounded across the space, covering ten meters in each step, clearing the entire kitchen counter and snatching up the forgotten mug of coffee, sealing the lid with one massive hand to cartwheel over Tom’s head and land mere inches in front of him.
“Your coffee Tom?” Sam grinned, barely breathing and not having broken a sweat, or spilled a drop.
“Holy shit Sam,” Tom took the mug and gaped. “Holy shit.”
“It’s been quite a ride, I made some mistakes earlier on, but nothing uncorrectable. I think I’ve got this pretty much figured out, now I just need to decide what to do next.”
“Next? Sam, you’re like…” he paused, his eyes wide and hand waving, “like freaking Superman.”
“Yes, I suppose I am in a way,” Sam crossed his arms, then stroked his chin, “but Superman was a good guy, wasn’t he?”
by Duncan Shields | Oct 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was ecstatic that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain-reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains made a little room between the different string permutations when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.
Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap down to the quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.
I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector so that I could see it. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little monomole.
Light even streamed in through the basement windows. It was perfect.
I sat back to watch the show.
I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a hexideximilliliter of her own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.
I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she seemed to suspect something. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.
Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.
She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she fell asleep. She’d fallen asleep because I had drugged her hot chocolate before I let the nanotech do its work and transfer her consciousness to her tiny doppleganger.
Her macro-world body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last hour, though. I wanted no trouble.
Soon she’d wake up on my mom’s couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly woven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.
I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments tonight and put a copy of me in there as well.
Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.
I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
In the steamy clearing, Roda crouched to be at eye level with the small centaur-like creature dressed in spider silk trews and waistcoat. Professor Malken stood, dressed in a way that indicated many years of expeditions. Roda’s fashionably shabby clothing already showed wear after only two days. He smiled as Roda hastily withdrew his hand from the creature’s lightning fast movement.
“It bit me!”
“No, she said hello.”
“She?”
“Pretty sure.”
“So ‘I didn’t rip your hand off’ means ‘Hi’?”
“Gross over-simplification, but basically yes.”
“And these horse-rat things rule this planet?”
“These ‘horse-rats’ as you call it are a unique feline-rodent centaur with an advanced no-metals culture that has no spoken language.”
Roda went white.
“Telepaths! Oh my god, my secrets are going to be sucked out!”
Malken sighed. Another student only here for the huge course credit available for expedition work. Shame, he thought Roda had been deeper in his motives as he always seemed so intense.
“No psionics. They have two sets of teeth. Front for communication, back for biting. A fascinating society. Our work is creating linguistic definitions for their complex communication that uses facial expressions and what we have called Clanching, the use of the front set of teeth. Equally, we are working with their greatest scholars to help them get a grip of the concept of a written language. There are decades of work here with scientific recognition and careers being made.”
“So what about names?”
“That presents a problem. As far as we have discerned, facial patterning is their individual identity. Our lack of significant facial markings is confusing. They regard any clean shaven human with two eyes and a nose above the mouth as my assistant Chando. That is why the ‘no beards’ regulation is enforced. I am the only human they can distinguish. I wish we could find another way. Some facial markings even seem to have some sort of duality as a rank significator as well.”
Roda stared at him. Malken raised an eyebrow. Roda turned to stare at the creature, then up at the pristine sky above. He smiled.
“You say that there are years of work here? So a dedicated researcher or someone who brought a useful ability could make a living quietly and contribute on his merits rather than history?”
Malken was startled by the intensity of the stare, but actually liked what he heard.
“Yes and yes. Roda, what are you getting at?”
Roda turned his back on the creature and Malken. He reached into one of his pockets and emerged with a strange blue-white glossy cloth. He seemed to look at it before taking it in both hands and wiping his face vigorously. Then he turned back. Malken paled. Roda waved the cloth, now dull black.
“It’s an illegal, undetectable, one-use epidermal masking kit. This was the removal tool.”
He carefully folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket before looking up at Malken.
“I am Rodney Chase, last surviving relative of Hadra Chase, deposed capo of the Ellis Quadrant Maori triads. I need a place to be someone else and to do something useful for once. I do believe I may have found it.”
The centaur stared at the elaborate caste tattoos that marked Roda’s face, then abased herself, front teeth chattering. Malken smiled.
“Senior Liaison Roda, I do believe you have been recognised as royalty by the locals. Can I interest his majesty in learning how to chat with his peers?”
Roda laughed, his face relaxing at last.
by submission | Oct 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : D’n Russler
“Quick! Someone get Raul some water, he’s nearly finished!”
The Survey team rushed to follow Hallie’s shouted command, as, verging on panic she checked her barely-moving team member’s vital signs.
Yahn, the team’s medic, slowly moistened the dark-haired Hispanic’s lips with water from her canteen as Hallie supported his head. “He’ll be ok, just needs to rehydrate and crash for a week.”
Raul murmured something unintelligible. “Don’t try to talk, Raul,” Hallie murmured. “We’ll get a full report from you when you’re feeling better.”
“No… you have to hear…” Raul struggled to say. “I managed to penetrate the shell of this planet — and…” He coughed, sputtering a bit on the water. “And… I expected caves, or rock, or something, but there was nothing there!”
“What do you mean,” Hallie asked, despite her concern for the explorer.
“We knew the planet was odd, having the size of Neptune, but a mass close to Earth’s. But this…”
They had begun their on-site survey as the end of a 30 light-year journey to the planet that just shouldn’t have been. Circling a white dwarf at a distance of 26 AU’s, the planet had an albedo of over 0.7, nearly twice Earth’s 0.37. It wasn’t till they landed that the reason was revealed: it was an artifact, created by some long-lost civilization.
“We were supposed to explore the low buildings in this grouping,” continued Raul. “Nothing higher than two stories anywhere on the surface, just didn’t make sense for remains of a civilization sophisticated enough to construct an entire planet.”
“And you HAD to open that portal, or door, or whatever it was,” responded Hallie, her frustration clear.
“Well, I *am* an explorer… that’s what we do, we explore!” replied Raul.
Hallie shook her tightly braided tawny mane in annoyance. “Explore, but we don’t stick our noses anywhere we don’t…”
“I opened the portal,” continued Raul, a strange rapture showing on his face. “It seems that they’d built a system of transport tubes inside the planet between points on the surface. Some sort of intercontinental rapid-transit system.”
“So you decided to try it out, eh?”
“No, even I am not that reckless. What I could see of the hollow interior was softly lit, some sort of glowing lines or tubes on the outer surfaces of the transport tubes. But that wasn’t the most shocking part.”
“And that was?”
“It seemed they had designed a planet-wide backup system in case the tubes went down. Everywhere, intertwining, great helixes, connecting every thing to every place. I was aghast when I realized what I was
seeing.”
“You mean –”
Raul’s eyes glazed over, seeing again what he beheld a short time
earlier.
“My god… it’s full of stairs.”
