by submission | Mar 24, 2013 | Story |
Author : Daniel Martin Fairbairn
Along the track the city slid past. Like an anamorphic visual soundtrack to the passing of time and past and present in his mind. The music from the earphones pulsing like some outer heart, reflecting the heat from the sun, and ejecting it from within through the tears stinging his eyes. The carriage rocked from side to side. The sound of the streets impinged into his insular void, sirens, yelling, trucks and music. All scratching at his mind.
A time ago, under a tree, he’d seen the truth. She’d held him in her hands, and awoken a being within him, that voice now clamoured in silence at the walls of his soul. An occasional disruption in the rythym of his heart. He felt like a double exposure. Two negatives exposed upon the photo paper of this skein of reality. Neither belonged, neither could break free. He closed his eyes and fought for the touch of the sun through those leaves once more.
Crowds. Bustle. Utter isolation within such diversity. Without warning he stopped and roared out loud, a primal gutteral pained screaming roar. Arms wide, people stopping, some just avoiding and rubber necking. Spittle issued forth from the back of his throat as he emptied his lungs and fell to his knees. Weep. Weep and be clean.
A month passed, and with it the seasons brightened. He found himself back in the mountains. The distance between him and the troubles of his concious mind was geographically tangible. His demons still haunted his dreams. Dreams that went untouched by his waking mind. The air racing up the mountain kept him wide and open. One day in late June, she returned. Early evening, as the mountain reflected the sunset off it’s shroud of snow, she settled onto the ground near his small fire. Wood crackled, and a kettle was knocked from it’s stand as she moved over the tundra towards him. Soundlessly. His breath caught in his chest, tongue moving without making noise. A terrific surge began in his chest and moved to his hands down his arms. Glowing gently. She reached out to him, and cast out a soft searching mist from her finger tips. It found his hands and they both rose up above the plateau.
The stars brightened as they welcomed home a pair of their own Kin. And somewhere above a silent mountain, a man wept with joy.
by submission | Mar 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Javen J.
1:10. Three fingers of vodka were left; two in the bottle and one in a tumbler. He had never drunk so much before; and never would again. At least there would be no record breaking hangover. He chased the tumbler with a sharp inhale. He looked down at his mangled knee. It was bloody and useless; but he had nowhere to go.
1:02. He had a hyper-rifle, two fingers of vodka and one minute to live. The countdown continued as feverish crashing reverberated through the makeshift barricade. He erected it to isolate himself in the orbital laboratory’s control center.
:55. He poured himself the rest of the vodka and sat the glass between his legs on the ground. He hoisted up the hyper-rifle and checked its charge. The rifle grew exponentially heavier as he lost more blood. Charge at four percent; about fourteen bursts of fire left.
:42. More than enough. He fingered the sight. It took him roughly fifty bursts to put down seven of the freaks and erect the barricade. However, there was no need to kill them all; only to preserve the countdown.
:38. He took a long deep breath and held up the vodka. He would not let it go to waste, like his research. He chased the vodka with a few tears and warm thoughts of his young lass.
:30. He heard metal twisting as the barricade began to give way. He figured the hatch must be cracking open because he could hear the creatures’ audible throat growls.
:24. Once friends and colleagues; now mindless victims of a botched experiment.
:20. The barricaded hatch crashed open and the howling abominations rushed into the control room.
:16. He delayed the stampede by hitting the first intruders in the knees with several rifle bursts.
:11. Suddenly the room was filled with creatures.
:08. Half of the freaks charged for the control panel behind him and the others began clawing at his already mangled body.
:05. He ignored the immense pain and fired his remaining bursts in defense of the panel.
:02. When his charge was depleted he used the butt of the rifle to shove one creature away from interface.
:00. The countdown terminated. He writhed in agony hoping the infliction was contained. Without warning the station’s grav-drive reached critical mass and vaporized the station and every piece of dust and particulate matter within a mile.
by submission | Mar 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Michael F. da Silva
“I didn’t know you were such a fight fan!” he said with a huge, dumb grin on his face. He couldn’t believe his luck.
“Oh, totally!” she beamed. “I got really into it because of my Dad. We’ve watched the Pan-Orion Championships every year together since I was little.”
“That’s awesome!”
Andre could hardly pry his eyes away from Julia’s perfect oval face. He led the way to their seats nearly tripping twice over groups of short, stocky Dokiads. She giggled each time making the lanky young man begin to shrink out of self-consciousness. As if to reassure him she moved close enough to wrap a hand around his bicep and helped him find their seats.
“Here we are!” he said, leading her around the torso-head of a ten-legged Thronumite.
Andre had spent two weeks’ wages on these seats in hopes of impressing her. They were close enough to smell the musk coming off a confident-looking horned gastropod waiting for its opponent across the tower cage.
“So, how long have you been a fan?” she asked as she put on a cute pair of pink-rimmed safety glasses.
“Pretty much since they divided up the fighters into divisions.” He said as he put on his own eye protection. “There wasn’t much point in watching Humans getting pounded by three-hundred-plus-kilo fighters. They might have a better chance now that the POC are letting fighters keep their military augs, I think.”
They talked excitedly about their favourite fights in between matches and cheered when a massive Stranoterste knocked the fangs out of a Sknenian’s outer jaws.
Summing up all of his courage, he slipped his hand into hers. She looked up and gave him a warm smile while she squeezed his hand in return before looking back at the action in the cage.
By the beginning of the main event, the much anticipated Carreira versus Fl’rk’k, they had fallen into each other’s eyes again. The thunderous roar of the crowd seemed to push them slowly into each other’s arms. The green blood spray across their faces was a distant sensation as they shared their first kiss.
by Julian Miles | Mar 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The shades of green here are like nowhere else in the world.
“Pre-zent arms!”
With a metallic crash, fourteen biobots swing their gantry guns skyward as their right arms raise in salute. The bier passes with a soft hum, the incongruously gentle sound of suppressor fields warring with the emissions from the remains within. Captain Martina Durren is coming home.
Somewhere under the depths of the Mindanao Deep, they found an Atlantean ‘submarine’. That being the only word applicable, although the vessel relates to nuclear submarines in the way that they relate to a toy submarine in a kid’s bath.
Unfortunately this incredible discovery was not made public. Taylor Nesmith, founder of the massive Interseas Group, decided to use the secrets in his attempt to become King of the World.
The bier comes to rest over the eighteen metre deep lead-lined pit.
“Fro’ rank, fire!”
Seven beams of coherent light stab skywards. The smell of scorched leaves and burnt rain is fitting as the bier sinks from view.
The wreck had contained weapons of the kind that sank Atlantis. Nesmith released recovered evidence proving that the sinking of that fabled place occurred during a war. Then he threatened by taking out a couple of uninhabited Pacific islands. When governments responded by increasing their efforts to stop him and his international corporation turned military combine, he sank Hawaii.
Historians were arguing about ‘what type of war’ and ‘who with’ when descendants of Atlantis’ opponents made representation to the United Nations via Peruvian envoys.
“Sec’n rank, fire!”
The Valusians are a reptilian race, distant relations of the dinosaurs. Decimated by the event that annihilated their kin, they lived in isolated communities until the Atlanteans hunted and waged war upon them to obtain technologies the Valusians refused to disclose. We know how well that went for Atlantis, but the victory was pyrrhic. The same technologies that caused the war now underpin our biomechanica. The Valusians worked with the UK military because their only salvageable technical city lay under the Norfolk Fens. The SAS work with them because our skills and temperament matches that of their combative caste, the Sheshna.
The assault on Nesmith’s ‘capital’ deep in the Gobi Desert caught him unprepared. A hundred biobots tore his nascent global empire to shreds.
His last act was to unleash a shoal of neo-Atlantean ‘geonukes’ from what we had thought was a minor outpost in the Okhotsk Abyss. The only one that detonated did so in the seabed midway between Norwich and Rotterdam. Scientists say the subsidence effect is pretty much the same as if the sea level had risen sixty metres over a radius of a thousand kilometres.
“Port arms!”
The reason we’re not all drowning is Martina. She led the raid on the Okhotsk installation. Quickly realising that taking the base from the overwhelming opposition or stopping the shoal was impossible, she ordered her team to stall the defenders while she tore the exotically radioactive cores from the ‘geonukes’ by hand. The shoal launched just as she reached the last one, the backlash mercifully killing her.
Her last words were: “Lay me down where I can see the loch through the trees.”
We marched from Magadan, escorting her home. Every city on the way stopped as people turned out to honour her passing.
On this chilly October morning I’m looking down on Loch Aslaich, knowing my bonny lass is home at last. I’ll no be joining her for a bit, but she said she didn’t mind.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was China that finally did it.
So little was known about the whys and hows of explosive decompression of the human body in space. There had been assumptions and guesses but nothing had happened yet in terms of accidents to give the scientists any bodies to study.
China’s space program was also curious.
It also happened to have ten criminals that it had condemned to death and were in good enough physical condition to qualify as astronauts.
They were strapped into their roller coaster chairs and kept in the back. Funny how the government didn’t balk at the idea of how much ten bodies would cost them in terms of fuel but they felt it was okay to skimp on anesthetic.
China’s government wasn’t doing it completely independently. They had been caught early on in the planning. After some top-secret political wrangling, the other two major governments of Earth had given China the silent go-ahead with the proviso that they share their data. They’d condemn the action if it ever came to light but other than that, they wouldn’t interfere. The information would be valuable and no one except China had the balls to do something like this.
And since there were no civilians up in space at the moment, eyewitnesses would be scarce.
The chairs were fitted with restraints bolted to the floor of the cargo bay. At no point would the prisoners be released. They’d simple be exposed to the vacuum of space for ten minutes and then the cargo bays would close and the shuttle would head back down to Earth.
Simple. Easy. Effective.
Like all horrible plans.
First of all, two of the criminals were adept at escaping locks. Second of all, space agencies weren’t as good at designing criminal restraints as prisons were. Third of all, the plan was to do the mission in radio silence. And fourth, the shuttles these days were mostly automated except for landing.
Weng Pen got out first when the G’s stopped. Pei Sheng followed suit. They freed the others.
One of the crew needed to do a final check on their bodies before the decompression. If only he’d checked the feeds coming from the inside.
That open door was all they needed.
The prisoners overwhelmed the crew, killing them or rendering them unconscious. They prisoners strapped the five crew members into the chairs.
The prisoners gathered into the cockpit and watched the red numbers count down.
The doors opened. Ten minutes passed. The doors closed. The ship turned slowly on its pre-programmed course back to China.
The dead bodies of the crew were the first images that ground control saw when the ship was back within accepted broadcast range parameters.
The other thing they saw was the laughing faces of the prisoners in the cockpit as manual control was restored to them for the landing.
One hard right later, the entire shuttle port and ninety government officials were ionized gas in the crater of the shuttle’s impact.
The rest of the governments of Earth have gone back to waiting for an accident to provide them with what happens upon an explosive decompression.
