by Julian Miles | Aug 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The post-incident review was in closed session and after the presiding officer read the first line of the bonded testimony, the session was restricted to herself and Brevet Captain Danyls alone.
“We are in complete privacy, Danyls. Having read your report and the recommendations of those with reputations to protect, I’d like you to take me through the end of the Vigilance’s last mission.”
With a nod, the frowning young woman stared at the blue fluctuations in the anti-snoop field and started to tell all in a calm voice.
*
She dived onto the bridge, heart hammering, smoke searing her lungs. Across all the port viewscreens, the impossible hulk they had hit hung like the gigantic headstone it was about to become. Her eyes were drawn to the video feed from Pinnace One, where Mike was buckling in.
Her hand slammed down on the intercom button. “Mike, what the hell are you doing?”
He looked up at her, guilt-faced “Sorry, Helen. It’s got to be done.”
“You don’t have to do this, Mike. What about us?”
“What I did with you was wrong and I admit my actions are tinged with relief in knowing you’ll never tell.”
Helen lurched back as if struck.
“I’m sorry, kiddo. You were great in the sack but in the end, I’m the irreplaceable asset on the Vigilance.”
“But Mike; Captain –“
“No time or interest in long goodbyes, Danyls. It was a pleasure having you.”
The screen went blank and the ‘clang’ of the departing pinnace shook the Vigilance.
*
Helen brought her eyes down from the blue.
“You have to understand that until his second sentence, I thought he was about to sacrifice himself to save us.”
The presiding officer nodded. “Go on.”
“After that, I suppose I could have interrupted him. Maybe I should have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, ma’am. I let him launch from the occluded side of the Vigilance, straight into the hulk. The reaction to his launch combined with that from the explosion when the pinnace hit the hulk broke us free.”
“After which you stabilised your drift away from the planet while the hulk entered the atmosphere, eventually causing a Category Eight catastrophe when it hit.”
“Yes, ma’am. But it went down without taking the Vigilance with it.”
“Your recommendation?”
“Captain Michael Tiernan should be buried with full honours, a Captain who died saving his ship and crew. The data that he was a philanderer and a coward who didn’t know the way around his own vessel is of no relevance to history or to his family. The result displays the proper command attitude.”
“Agreed. Captain Tiernan will be a feted hero. You, Deputy Danyls, are offered command of the Vigilance Two. Your recommendation proves that you have learned a hard lesson.”
“I accept. Thank you, ma’am.”
“Very well. Captain Helen Danyls, you are dismissed.”
by submission | Aug 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The policeman and his young partner crouched down by the doors of the warehouse. Their night-vision contact lenses allowed them to see perfectly in the darkness.
“You ready?” asked the older cop.
“Ready,” said the rookie.
The veteran officer considered his partner. The young fellow has the courage of ignorance, he thought. He recalled having had similar self-confidence just before his first raid. It’s easy to be brave when you’re up against an abstraction. It doesn’t look that bad in the pictures and videos. Encountering what’s on the other side of that door in real life is a substantially different experience. A few people can face it head-on and do just fine. Most need some measure of acclimation. And then there are those who just can’t take it. For the latter, their first raid is also their last. They have to find another line of work.
The older cop motioned for a robot to approach. The machine quietly padded over and began spraying a thin stream of solvent on the lock between the two doors. The metal started dissolving. The two flesh and blood policemen took up positions on either side of the robot. The senior cop nodded at the automaton. It pulled the doors open, the corroded bolt between them crumbling to the ground, and rushed in, its headlamps shining brightly, twin guns attached to either arm at the ready. The two officers followed it in.
“Get down on the floor, face down, put your hands behind your heads, and interlace your fingers!” the older cop barked at the six rough looking men in the warehouse. One of the men tried to go for a gun that was sitting on a counter. The robot’s left gun arm locked on to him and fired. A taser bullet struck the criminal in the left shoulder, the barbed, electrified slug dropped him to the floor.
“ON THE FLOOR!” screamed the officer. The remaining suspects complied. Lights shone in through the windows around the warehouse: additional police robots.
The rookie looked in stunned silence at the enormous room. The carcasses of cows hung upside down suspended by their hind legs in one part of the warehouse, blood from severed carotid arteries and jugular veins draining into large basins. In another section, pigs were in various stages of dismemberment. Over to the right, a door to a walk-in freezer was open, the raid having taken place just as one of the men was stepping out of it. Frozen chickens could be seen inside.
On a hot plate on a counter, bacon sizzled in a skillet. Testing the product. The scent filled the air. The rookie turned pale and promptly threw up. Two police robots walked in through the front doors and proceeded to restrain the suspects with plastic cable ties.
“You okay?” the elder cop asked his young partner.
“Yeah,” the young man said, his voice thick. “Sorry. I didn’t think I’d…” He let the sentence trail off.
“It happens. You get used to this. Sort of.” The senior officer shook his head. “Texturized vegetable protein, 3D printed synthetic meat, tofu and tempeh. We like to think we’re so civilized and that mass murder like this is a thing of the past. There are even some sickos who’d like to turn back the clock and decriminalize eating meat.”
“And to think for most of history up until a hundred or so years ago most people actually ate this stuff,” said the rookie.
The old cop looked at the restrained detainees seated on the warehouse floor.
“Damned omnivores.”
by Duncan Shields | Aug 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’ve stabbed deep into the envelope around the white dwarf sun at the center of this solar system. My gravity repellers are maxed. I’ve skimmed the perihelion right in the onionskin. I came in at .75c and the slingshot here has nudged me just past full light. This experimental craft is performing perfectly. A silver arrow of flexible diamond called The Needle. The seventeen thrusters that have burst-accelerated me across a fifth of the Milky Way to end up here have all been discarded behind me like Fibonacci-spaced buoys. I was by all accounts the fastest human-constructed artifact in the universe.
I am seven miles away from the surface of the dwarf and here I will stay.
I can look up from my cockpit and see the whorls and radiation of the star like a static, unchanging borealis. My ship’s cabin protects me from the effects as does my hubris.
I have found out what happens when a ship with mass goes faster than the speed of light. Caught by surprise, physics found a mutually agreeable solution that I have not found agreeable.
The moment I hit 1.0000001.c, all of my control panels stopped. They didn’t turn off. They just stopped. Anything that oscillated froze in mid strobe. My shuddering, screaming, deafening ship became silent. Oddly, I am free to move about. I can touch everything in my cockpit but I cannot move it. It’s like I am immersed in a three-dimensional photograph.
I am a fly trapped in an amber bulb of time. Why my consciousness has been permitted to remain alert is a mystery. Perhaps something to do with Schrodinger and perception. Even though there will be no outcome, there needs to be an observer.
The folks back home are waiting for telemetry from my ship. By my viewpoint, they will always be waiting.
I have been here for six days so far. My ship has not moved forward and I have not run out of air and I’m felt no hunger or thirst. I seem to be destined to remain here. In a few years, I suppose I’ll find out if I’m even aging at all.
If I’m caught in a loop, it’s a loop too small for me to detect. I won’t go forward. I won’t go back. I have been put ‘oh hold’ by the universe’s laws.
I wonder how many alien astronauts dot the border of light with me, strung out across the galaxy like doomed fireflies in jars.
Perhaps when the universe ends and physical laws break down we will all be set free to complete our parabolas.
Until then, my orbit is not done. My orbit will never be done.
by Clint Wilson | Aug 20, 2013 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The team signaled goodbye to the assembled early humans. The tribe of twenty-three men, woman and children stood there in their animal skins. Many of them held the new tools. All of them now held the knowledge that had been passed on to them in the past four months.
Professor Smith would miss his subjects dearly. He had grown not only to care for them greatly but had come to think of them as family. It was the same with the other six researchers. There had been one more traveler when they arrived in the spring but a saber-toothed tiger had seen to her demise.
There was a flash of white light and then the early humans stood once more alone in the vast unscathed world.
Inside the machine the researchers all stood looking at one another. They remained silent during the twenty-minute time transfusion. They all knew well enough what they had done. The results of this experiment would be permanent as they all hoped to greatly advance the technology of the human race within their own lifetimes. The real mystery was what they would find when they got back home.
They would land less than a nanosecond after their initial departure; to witness the alternate future they had now created by introducing so many technological advances to the once uninformed bipedal creatures.
The humming of the wormhole engines wound down to a halt and the blackness outside the windows lightened once again to reveal the year 2013. And what a year they encountered!
All the roads seemed to be covered in a hard cement-like substance. Strange sleek horseless carriages raced by, traveling at least thirty or forty miles an hour. And the buildings, some of them reached ten or fifteen stories high!
The travelers huddled together behind their tinted glass. Never before had they witnessed such marvels. All of them, including Professor Smith, silently wished for their old slow world and simple architecture, with structures that rarely reached higher than two stories, and hand painted signs that didn’t light up. This was going to take some getting used to.
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by Julian Miles | Aug 19, 2013 | Story
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They say that a man who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for his target and one for himself. I dug two hundred and seventy-nine.
Into two hundred and thirty-seven of them I put all that remained of the inhabitants of my home town, Padgest. I had to guess which bits belonged to whom toward the end. The two hundred and thirty-eighth is Karen’s.
Filling the next forty has taken me six years. Six years to track down every member of the Twenty-Third Special Operations Commando, who turned my home into an abattoir during the dying days of the ‘Endless’ Empire. They went their separate ways after the war, slipping anonymously back into the newly-freed populations as their training had taught them to do.
The first squad ran an adventure holiday company on Eridanus. My quest for vengeance nearly ended there. Eight-to-one odds, only offset by the fact that they had all gone to seed quickly, partying hard with their customers. I shipped their bodies home in a freight container.
The second squad was ruling the planet of Haberdesh. I had to start a rebellion to get them and only salvaged a suitcase full of remains to bring back.
The third squad had become bounty hunters. I realised that my need to look them in the eyes as they died would get me killed, thus personal vengeance ceded to practicality and I sabotaged their ship. I brought their frozen bodies home strapped to the outside of my hull like sculptures.
The fourth squad came after me. It was inevitable that they would keep in contact with their former comrades and work out that someone had declared open season on them all. I spent eight months in hospital after the month-long running battle with them, wading through the stinking swamps and blighted mires of Kelsige, relying on a native crossbow as the planet’s corrosive atmosphere destroyed their kit and removed their advantages.
The command squad split up while I was in hospital and went to brutal lengths to conceal their tracks, forgetting one thing: a trail of bodies is easier to follow than a trail of transactions.
I found them all and dealt with them one at a time. As I didn’t have their training, I had to improvise: hiring a truck to crush a coffee shop, dropping a skip on a stationary car, using a tourist submersible to sink a yacht, using home-made bombs to cause an avalanche, a rockslide and a bridge collapse.
The former leader of the 23rd SOC retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains of Tarkerut. He used all his skills to make the place lethally inaccessible. So I used mortar bombs filled with Charo musk to paint the walls and roof. Charo are voracious and look like the furry bastard spawn of lampreys and cockroaches. He tried to stop the infestation I attracted and died very badly, if the screams were anything to go by. I had to wait two months to retrieve his remains.
Today I filled his grave and walked across the blue grass meadow to where Karen’s mound lies next to the only empty grave. I sit on the edge of the open grave and tell her about the last death while I finish my champagne and cyanide. Then I check the deadfall holding the earth back from the grave.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
Next to my girl, forever to keep
Come judgment day or ending times
The guilty have paid for their crimes.”
The darkness washes in as I feel myself topple into my grave.
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