by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Alumnus
I stood over him. His blood made a growing pool as it exited the wound in his back. The ounce slug of lead had gone all the way through. He looked up at me with crazed eyes. He raised his hands to me. He tried to speak, but choked on pink, foamy slime, evidence that his lungs were shredded. For one brief moment he achieved clarity. His eyes steadied. I think he smiled before he died.
When he woke up that morning, he didn’t know he was going to die. He probably had plans for the day. Perhaps a dinner date. Maybe he still had a father somewhere that used to take him fishing. A father that would mourn him. Someone who loved him.
I guess I should have felt something. Something at the death of a fellow human being. I felt nothing but revulsion. He knew the law. He knew the penalty for his actions. For his disgusting behaviour. For his loathsome ways. There were no innocent parties. I slipped the Mossberg back into the sheath strapped to my thigh and climbed back in the growler.
As we left the scene I called for a meat wagon to pick up what was left of the human flotsam. Before I closed the door, I took one last look down at the black and white caricature of a human being below me. The tragic figure seemed to spin slowly as we spiraled up into the traffic pattern. I must have been looking down longer than I thought. My partner, Sergeant Ray Chavez, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at his throat mike. I tapped my temple and activated my earwig. His voice came through loud and strong despite the rush of air from the open door.
“Hey buddy, what’s up? You seem a little quiet today.”
I had to put all my weight against the door to pull it down and shut. I sat for a moment thinking about his seemingly innocuous question. “Just thinking,” I said.
“Yeah? What about?”
I considered his question. I thought of the body lying there on the pavement a thousand feet below. The curled lips caught in the gruesome rictus of death. The twisted body. The face and features contorted, resembling a bizarre, nightmarish image caught in the black and white photograph of a bygone era.
“I was just thinking,” I said when I finally spoke, “how much I fucking hate mimes.”
by Clint Wilson | Mar 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
As they lowered into a spot outside the arena and Jeremy’s father shut the hove’s engines down he continued to give his son the pep talk. “A year enslavement. Do you even know what that means? Of course you don’t,” he answered himself. “You haven’t ever had it tough, haven’t ever lost a playoff series, haven’t had to go live in a place where everyone hated you and picked on you and abused you every chance they got.”
“Yeah, I know dad,” he answered as he procured his hockey bag and sticks from the hove’s luggage bay. “Don’t worry, we’ll beat these guys.”
“Well you’d better, is all I can say. Me and some of the other dads need at least half those kids in the factory by morning if we’re going to make our quota. And god forbid, if you lose? I don’t even want to think about that!”
“We’re not going to lose dad. I’ll be home safe tonight.”
Suddenly Jeremy’s mother appeared with his little sister. They had been waiting at the arena entrance. Both had tears in their eyes.
“Oh baby,” Jeremy’s mother cried, “I hate playoffs so much.”
As the game progressed things got heated in the stands as well as on the ice. Parents from both sides hurled insults and expletives at each other as their children skated their hearts out in one of the roughest and most hard fought playoff finals in the junior league’s history.
And in the end, the ten to one underdog Mooseport Rockets scored a dramatic overtime goal to trounce their richer, better coached and far better fed rivals from Upper Eastplane.
And as mother, father and daughter huddled in tears amongst the other crying families in their bleacher section, the heavily armed on-ice officials escorted the losing team to the far end of the arena.
“My baby! My baby boy!” cried Jeremy’s mother over and over, while his father wondered worriedly how he was going to continue to deal with the labor shortages at the factory.
The Upper Eastplane Eagles weren’t even allowed to change out of their gear as they were taken, skates and all, to the waiting prison transport. Jeremy gulped. He heard they had some god awful sweat shops in Mooseport. Why oh why hadn’t he just skated a little harder?
by Julian Miles | Mar 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“The view from here is mighty fine, it sends a shiver up my spine.”
I laugh at Kara’s ditty as it arrives. Nothing but the truth, even out here. My suit keeps me spread-eagled on the side of cannon four as it thunders along with its seven brothers, sending the Espiritu de Sanctii further from the remains of my home.
“How’s things, big guy?”
“Sweet as, babe. Just hanging around waiting for the boys. Good view, rockin’ rhythm, best seat in the house.”
Canopus fades from view in the drive-flare as I finish my sentence. I had been top ganger at Wenceslas Station, the only man for the tricky job of checking the fuel couplings on the Vatican flagship. It had all been going well until a distress call from a convoy activated the ‘expedite rescue’ sequence. Not one of the holy orders had thought to obey the procedures for hard-lock maintenance, so the ship had obeyed the clarion call and lit out to the rescue at emergency speed while the crew got their asses in gear.
Wenceslas Station had taken a level two decompression when the ship tore loose. They were just scrambling to contain that major atmosphere breach when the station took the brunt of a full-bore eight cannon overburn. I watched in numb horror as eight thousand people died in a chain detonation that scattered fiery pearls across Canopian space. The ship did not deviate from its path.
I had just finished checking cannon four when the burn started. The violent lurch activated my failsafe magnetics, which combined with the fact that I was standing at ninety degrees to the thrust vector meant I slammed down onto the hull over drive number four that had been beneath my feet. My safety array became a prison. While we continued to move and the station beacon was not found, the array kept me stuck like a barnacle to a keel. Kara is forward and half a rotation separated from me. She had been in the tube between airlocks when it happened. Her magnetics had plastered her face down mere metres from the ship’s airlock.
“Dave, what are we going to do about this?”
“Tell your suit to seek supplementary power to maintain emergency state. It should probe and find an external maintenance panel to get you juice and goop.”
“Done that. What next?”
“Tell your suit to ready emergency hibernation measures with realspace restart.”
“Actioned. Why?”
“Because at some point this bastard is going to dive.”
Dive being slang for entering drivespace. Consciousness cannot not tolerate that without experiencing sanity’s equivalent of a blancmange being hit by a sledgehammer. Driveships have suppressor fields to stop crew meltdown. Those fields are for internal passengers only.
“Oh crap.”
“Not a problem. We get to doze for a bit and wake up somewhere new.”
“Sure?”
“Promise. Plus we get to be famous.”
“Why would we – ”
Reality tore into spinning curtains of impossible colours and my suit reacted just fast enough. The lights went out.
*
“Dave!”
My mouth tasted like the green greeblie from the back of beyond had done something unspeakable in it. The lights were too bright and I had a pounding headache.
“Quietly, woman.”
Kara whispered: “Why would we be famous?”
I looked about the medical suite. There were several people in Canopian Ranger uniforms standing around with witness recorders. I grinned at Kara.
“Because no-one has ever survived doing something that insanely stupid.”
She hit me hard and low. Apparently she only kissed me after I had passed out, the rotten cow.
by submission | Mar 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : A. Zachary Spery
I was looking good when I wheeled into Chaucer’s, the hottest singles bar in lower downtown. I just had my corpus bridge upgraded to a new Mitsushimi DX900q and installed prominently on the side of my Neodynamics’ engramatic coprocessor case. My high efficiency General Electronics’ sonofusion power cell glowed a brilliant green through the walls of the polyurethanic cylinder housing in my abdomen and my polished aluminum frame was gleaming. My drive wheels were new Goodyear’s.
I rolled across the room to an empty space at the bar and ordered my usual gin and tonic. The bar tender handed it to one of my end-effectors. I swung around and leaned back on the elbow of my quaternary manipulator to casually survey the room.
That’s when she rolled in. She had a classy rig with the kind of right angles that would drive the Robopope to sin. It was elegant, with just enough acrylic-plexi to see there was high dollar hardware inside, but not so much that you could tell the bus speed of her hypothalamic multiplexor. She wheeled up beside me and ordered a girly drink–something with an umbrella. The other men in the bar were disassembling her with their optical sensors.
I craned my neck over and said, “Girl, you’ve increased my coolant flow by orders of magnitude.”
She pointed one of her optics at me briefly and removed a cigarette from her purse. “It looks like you can handle it.” Then she smiled and said, “Nice cooling system.”
My CPU voltage capped and the chrome on my heat sinks blued.
She continued, “But I don’t think you could handle me. You’re not my style.” She swiveled her optical instrument array away. “Too much show, too little go.”
I gestured to the transparent cover over my DSX-771 motherboard cluster with onboard cognitive accelerators. “Girl, I am all go. I am the Italian sports car of go. It takes me mere seconds to calculate pi out to a billion decimal places.”
She smiled again. “No, not that kind of go–”
Just then a large industrial unit lumbered up and put a hulking mechanical arm on the bar between her and me. He had a flat grey coat of paint over a steel art deco exoskeleton that made him look like a soviet era locomotive. Gears spun and clunked within him, heat waves emanated from a vent on his head, and I think my state of the art Trasco olfactory sensors detected a hint of burned oil.
“Is this jerk bothering you?” asked the locomotive while glaring at me.
“I think he was just keeping your spot cool until you arrived, baby.” she said. “Weren’t you, Fonzy?”
“Thanks.” said the locomotive as he pushed me over to the adjacent spot–stripping the gears in my drivetrain. “I owe you one.”
I left. Maybe I’ll try Duffy’s.
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Mark stood a few feet from the doorman and presented his ID, which was accepted with apparent derision.
The heavily muscled bouncer glanced over the details of the badly forged photo card and tossed it back.
“One point eight meters? No way you’re that tall. Take a hike.”
Mark caught the card with his off hand without breaking eye contact and held the stare for a moment before looking down at the photo card.
“Funny, that’s about the only thing on here that is right. How about you let me in anyways? I’ve got a lot of drinking to do, and this night’s not getting any younger.”
The doorman’s face split in a wide grin, metal capped teeth catching the streetlight as he ran his hands back over the stubble on his head and stepped forward.
“How’s about you bugger off, mate, before you get hurt?” He exhaled through clenched teeth as he placed both hands flat on Mark’s chest and pressed him violently into the street, tossing him like a rag doll to where he landed in a heap.
Mark pushed himself slowly upright, then got his feet back under him while fingering the torn shirt sleeve where he’d skidded across the blacktop.
“Shouldn’t have done that meathead,” he licked his lips, breaking into a low jog and dropping his shoulder as he impacted the startled bouncer, running with him the couple of meters to the building wall and slamming him into the brick with a clearly audible outrush of air.
Mark stepped back, leaving the bigger man to catch his breath.
“I’ve gotta warn you shithead,” the bouncer wheezed, “I’m hardened mech, not your average meatbag doorman, and I’m quite capable and licensed to put you in the hospital or a body bag.” Having recovered alarmingly quickly the doorman stepped back into the fray with purpose. “Or for that matter, the dumpster out back if you push the wrong buttons.” Mark barely had time to take a defensive stance before the angered man was on him, raining a flurry of blows to his ribs as Mark tucked in his elbows and covered his face with his fists. The doorman beat him back off the sidewalk, onlookers moving quickly away to make room while several opportunists started taking bets.
Having driven Mark into the street, the doorman again pushed him away. “I’m not someone you’ll want to piss off,” and with that he stepped forward and drove his fist between Mark’s still raised hands and into his face, knocking him off his feet and into a pile once more on the asphalt.
Leaving him unmoving in the road, the bouncer turned and started back to his post at the door.
Mark exploded from the ground and reached the retreating man in barely a heartbeat, landing multiple blows to his lower back before torquing in a perfectly executed roundhouse kick to the side of his head, knocking him hard to the ground.
When the bouncer had struggled back upright, he found Mark bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, grinning like he’d just eaten the neighbour’s cat.
“If you’re mech, then you’re just my type, sweetheart.” Mark thumbed the side of his nose, then shook his hands at his sides before taking up a boxer’s stance again. “Get’s boring as hell tossing meatbags for a living, doesn’t it?”
The bouncer felt something turn inside and, his post forgotten, stepped off the curb and cracked his knuckles.
“I’m guessing Marquess of Queensberry’s not quite your style?”
Mark laughed out loud.
“How about MCMAP?”
The bouncer’s grin returned. “Oorah,” was all he replied.
