by Patricia Stewart | Sep 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Gregori Milankovitch relaxed in his folding camp chair, admiring the dull red sun as it skimmed along the cloudless horizon. “What a beautiful sunset,” he casually remarked.
“Why do you insist on calling it a sunset?” snapped Mrs. Milankovitch. “The sun never sets up here. It just races around the horizon every thirty-eight minutes. It makes me dizzy. I’m beginning to hate this planet. I vote we head back to base. There’s nothing up here but rocks.”
“That’s not true, dear. We found fish skeletons earlier today, and the nearest source of water is over 200 kilometers away. How do you purpose we explain that conundrum to Tom? This planet doesn’t have tectonic plates to raise a continent from the sea floor.”
“Maybe a tsunami,” she suggested. “This spinning top of a planet must have some quirky geology.”
“We’ve had seismographs on Alpha Adhemar for over a decade. The planet is dead. No earthquakes, no volcanoes, no nothing. It’s just a solid rock covered by a vast ocean.”
“Except for this content,” she countered, in an attempt to gain some advantage in the argument.
“Well, sure. But that’s because we’re at the geographic North Pole. If we were further south, we’d be a thousand meters beneath the twenty kilometer oceanic equatorial budge like all the other mountain tops.”
Returning to the fish debate, she offered, “How about a tsunami created by a comet or asteroid impact?”
“Oh, pleeeease. Did you forget about Beta Adhemar,” he replied, pointing toward the bright ‘star’ on the horizon opposite the sun.
“What about it?”
“It’s a super gas giant locked in orbital resonance with Alpha Adhemar. Every twenty-two years, its highly elliptical orbit brings it to perihelion such that it lines up with Alpha Adhemar’s aphelion. If there were any Apollo objects crossing Alpha?s orbit, Beta would have vacuumed them up eons ago. Give it up, Khristina. We need to stay here until we can figure out how these fish managed to walk hundreds of kilometers.”
“Maybe they are flying fis?” Khristina came to an abrupt stop when the sun dipped below the horizon. “What the hell just happened? Why did the sun set?”
“Oh my God,” exclaimed Gregori as his heart started pounding when he realized the implications, “the planet’s axis must be tipping over. Beta must have destabilized us. Quick, into the TRAM. We need to get back to the base before the sea reaches the assent vehicle.”
More than halfway to base, they received a garbled message that the rising tide was approaching fast, and they couldn’t wait another rotation. Tom started to say something else, but the transmission was lost. Twenty minutes later, Khristina and Gregori watched helplessly as a vertical contrail split the sky.
“There goes our ride,” remarked Gregori as he brought the TRAM to a stop. But along the horizon, he could see a column of dust being kicked up by a vehicle heading their way.
Ten minutes later, a second TRAM towing a trailer pulled alongside. Tony Salvataggio smiled, “Someone call for an ark?” he asked as he indicated the four person Ocean Explorer resting in the trailer’s cradle. “Space Search and Rescue said they’d have an Ocean Lander here in about six months. Well, don’t just sit there looking dumbfounded, climb aboard, we only have another hour before this rock becomes an undersea plateau.”
by featured writer | Sep 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Featured Writer
I flick wing over wing and dive, engines howling as some bright blue nastiness passes through where I was. Half committed in the dive I pull the nose up and jink sideways, broadside to angle of travel. The parachute effect yaws me and I float a moment as the world goes slow. Echo One seems to drift across my nose and I squeeze the teat that causes my railgun to punch a chunk of titanium through his centre section. His drive objects to my percussive realignment and my screens have to flash-compensate as he passes the pearly gates at Mach 9, in pieces.
Even as his pyre dissipates I bring the hammer down and perfectly bullseye the corona of his demise. Wish I could see that in long shot, a ring of energy, a ring of smoke, a ring of fire and pieces, and my exhaust like a shaft through the middle, with me as the arrowhead.
My teller flashes and I corkscrew into an inverse slingshot before even looking. Echo Two coming for the title, out of the sun. Please. In this day and age? I continue the dive until he’s happy, then shut the backdoor and open the flue. Still hurtling surfaceward at Mach 8 I flip apex over base so the sharp end is pointing the right way. Echo Two discovers this as he flies head on into a few kilos of titanium doing Mach 20. Ouch. But this allows me to reopen the back door and hurtle through his expanding debris cloud without a scratch.
This is frustrating for Echo Three as he was expecting me to still be heading down due to the impossible g-forces involved in attempting sudden manoeuvres at these speeds. Of course, any airbreather would be jelly by now. Forty gees will do that unless you’re some sort of cartilaginous predator from the benthic depths of the Pacific, suspended in a hyperconductive saline gel. Handily enough, that’s exactly what I am. I’m callsign Kilo Ten. A revered ancestor was callsign Kraken. Got a proud family history of killing things to live up to.
Echo Three pulls a half loop with a roll out of his attack and ends up screaming down at me, flat out and very angry. Opens fire way out of range. He could have been dangerous if he’d kept his cool. As it is, I release a nanotube braced monofilament net, stand myself on my tail and punch it. Echo Three is about to become a cloud of hundred-mil chunks that will be a bigger threat than he ever was.
The skies clear as the smudges of dogfighting blow away. I click my beak as the blue fades to black and the stars come out. There’s always something magical about that transition. Seven hours to base. One hour debrief while the gel is cycled, then I get to go hunting again. Ocean depths are nothing to the vasty deeps of space, and I like to think we’ve made the transition well. Sleepless predators we’ve always been, but mankind gave me the stars, the enhanced smarts to love them and the means to defend them.
I pass the moons before engaging Hirsch, then flutter my tentacles to work out the kinks while my arms cue up some cetacean jazz and sketch three more kill-kanji for the hull.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Sep 14, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
“Jesus jumpin’ Christ,” ejaculated Cpl. Davidson before he died. Though clad in nearly impervious plasteele body armour, his head was cleanly ripped from his body.
“Run away, run away,” the rest of the men in his squad screamed as they fell pell mell over one another. The creatures went by different names; Bandersnatch, Grendel, Jabberwocky. Vicious Motherfuckers, or VM’s, was not an uncommon term.
Whatever they were, they certainly weren’t the creatures that created and piloted the immense spacecraft that had taken up residence in Earth orbit. No, these were brutal mindless beasts that appeared to kill and destroy anything without a conscious thought. A biological killing machine.
Lt. Fenwick let out a deep sigh as he watched his men hauling ass across the plain with a Jabberwock trailing close behind. Their enhanced speed, augmented by the armour, was no match for the creature. Much to the terror of the fleeing men, the beast quickly gained.
“Vorpal ready,” barked the Leftenant.
“Vorpal weapon ready, Sir,” replied his gunner.
“Wait for it.” The Lt. raised his field glasses just in time to see another of his men fall beneath the scythe-like claws of the beast. It paused just long enough to shred the hapless soldier before resuming the chase. The drawback of the Vorpal weapon was its range in an atmosphere. It spat a stream of tiny magnetically accelerated ferro/tungsten particles at seemingly relativistic velocities. In the near vacuum of space, the range was virtually limitless, in an atmosphere as dense as that of Earth however…
“Hold your fire until you have range,” Fenwick ordered as another of his men fell to the loathsome nightmare. The gun crew watched in anguish as their comrades died while they remained impotent until the bastard could be drawn within range.
“Wait for it… wait for it…” Despite the bunker’s chill conditions, imparted by the weapons coolant system, beads of sweat rolled down the young officer’s face . “Almost there… almost… FIRE!”
The Vorpal emitted a muted shushing sound as mag-accelerated particles, little larger than coarse sand, issued forth in a coherent pencil-thin stream. At hyper velocities the trillions of individual particles took on a solid aspect that sheared through the monsters nearly invulnerable exoskeleton and severed it neatly in two. Though mortally wounded, the torso of the Jabberwock still pursued its prey at speed with its four upper appendages and managed to slaughter another soldier before it expired.
Despite the daemon’s recent demise, the remaining men of the patrol continued to hastily beat feet back to the safety of the bunker. While the exhausted men shed their armour in the cramped bunker’s antechamber, Lt. Fenwick called his company HQ requesting a mortuary team to retrieve his fallen soldiers. Clicking his teeth, he logged off the company freq and turned to Master Gunnery Sergeant Kalnick.
“Bad day Gunny. Bad fuckin’ day.”
“Yeah LT. I just wish we could get a ‘wok alive.”
“Why? There’s nothing we can learn from them. They’re little more than a living automaton programmed to destroy. They’re mindless.”
“Yeah, I know. I just want to see how long one would hold out against my mother-in-law.”
by Duncan Shields | Sep 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.
You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.
That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.
They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.
They looked like us for a reason.
And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.
In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.
Humans.
Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.
According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.
That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.
We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.
We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.
But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.
It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.
The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.
The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.
Suits us fine.
However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.
And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.
by submission | Sep 11, 2011 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
When they described this planet to me, rogue, free from its orbit, adrift in space, I pictured a world of devoid of light, a world enveloped in darkness. But to my surprise, as I walk through the ruined city, protected from the vacuum of space by an environmental suit, my way is lit by the glistening of a million stars. With no atmosphere, the starlight passes unrefracted to the surface. It’s like looking up into a populated metropolis, like seeing an echo of what the city had once been.
I pull my eyes away. We have no time for stargazing. The planet will soon drift too far for our ships to follow, and we have a mission to complete. I order my team to canvass the large buildings to our left and right, while I walk, somewhat nostalgically, through the park in the center. I can direct the entire operation here, alone with my thoughts. I wonder. Who were the people who once stood here? What were their names? Did they know that their planet would one day be torn from its sun, sent drifting in space like a wandering vagabond?
The ruins of a great obelisk lie before me. The man it was meant to honor is now forgotten. All that effort to honor a single person, wasted. I shake my head. I’m getting sentimental.
Turning my back on the ruins, I see a member of my team approaching. I can’t even tell who it is until he speaks. The helmets make it impossible.
“Sir,” he says. “We found the document, or what’s left of it. It was nothing but dust. It appears some rubble from the ceiling shattered the glass seal meant to preserve it.”
I sigh into the breathing unit in my helmet. So that’s it. Another piece of history lost. One stray rock, a twist of physics, and our mission is a failure. It took us months to find this site, years to plan the expedition. And it’ll be decades, maybe even centuries before our propulsion technology advances enough for us to return. I try my best not to look disappointed as I order everyone to salvage what they can and get back to the lander.
As I watch the planet drift away from our ship, I say a silent prayer for the people who died on that planet when disaster struck. I thank God for my ancestors, the people who were off world, the people who were spared the catastrophe. And I say goodbye to Earth, the rogue planet, doomed to drift forever in the vastness of space.
