by submission | Jun 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Chris Limb
Patrons and customers, my name is Azure Gemollua and I’m your chief flight attendant. On behalf of Captain Swaran and the entire crew I would like to welcome you aboard this Paragon Starline scheduled flight to Nu Phonecis.
We are particularly delighted you have chosen to travel with Paragon, especially in the light of the recent press allegations. As a special thank you for your loyalty we would like to offer all of those on board a 50% voucher towards the cost of your next booking.
Shipboard flight time until hyperspace jump will be two hours during which we will accelerate to a maximum speed of point nine nine nine C. Length of the jump will be 45 light years, throughout which all cephalophrenic life forms will experience no conscious thought; any non-cephalophrenic life forms are asked to please make themselves known to the flight attendants in advance of the jump so that complementary mental dampeners can be provided.
Even if you are a regular traveller, we now request your full attention as the flight attendants demonstrate the safety features of this spacecraft.
There are six emergency airlocks on this Hyperbus 997, two at the front, two at the rear and two over the nacelles. Please take a few moments now to locate your nearest airlock; in some cases it may be behind you.
In the event of decompression due to meteor strike, a SmartSuit™ is stowed under your seat. Place it over your head and pull on the red toggle to activate automatic envelopment. If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, please secure your own suit before helping them with theirs.
Please surrender control of your body to the SmartSuit™ AI should it become necessary. The SmartSuit™ is equipped with a sub-space distress beacon and a whistle for attracting attention.
In the unlikely event of the spacecraft stopping in hyperspace, please do not be alarmed by anything you may see or hear should you regain consciousness. Just adopt the “nightmare” position, leaning forward with your hands on top of your head, earplugs in place, eyes tightly closed and your elbows against your thighs. Ensure your feet are flat on the floor.
On no account attempt to move or leave the spacecraft. Do not engage hallucinations in conversation, no matter how many times they insist they’re real. Do not under any circumstances agree to let them come with you. Most important of all it is imperative that you do not believe any stories they might tell you about being passengers on a previously compromised vehicle or about the SmartSuit™ AIs mutinying.
At this time, please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position, that your zero gravity harness is correctly fastened and that any portable electronic devices are switched off or set to ‘spacecraft’ mode until a further announcement is made. In a few moments, the flight attendants will be passing around the cabin to offer you hot or cold drugs with our compliments.
Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. Thank you.
by submission | Jun 25, 2016 | Story |
Author : Christina Richard
The walls of our Ford Starblazer convulsed as we broke the atmosphere of the tiny blue planet and hurtled through the gray haze of clouds, down towards a sprawling, rocky plane. Outside, there was a violent noise of metal ripping away from the body of our ship. Next to me, Harris’s teeth slammed together inside his skull, his eyes bright and narrow, his knuckles white peaks of bone on the controls as he fought like hell to keep us right-side up. Volcanic rock, reddish black and gaping with craters, grimaced, waiting for us.
“Here we go,” said Harris. Harris’s military training as a warship pilot was one of the only reasons I was still alive, but I closed my eyes anyway and felt the stomach-emptying plunge of our landing toss my bones around like a handful of pickup sticks. Somehow, Harris never seemed afraid, and maybe that was one of the reasons I kept flying with him, even after Williams and Carson were incinerated. That, and neither of us could afford a better ship.
When Harris said we could make it to a blue planet near enough to land on, I thought he read the map wrong again; why hadn’t the Pan-Asian Alliance sold it to the senior executive of some fuel company yet? Most of the blue planets had been turned into private resorts and were surrounded by battle-quality drones that wasted precious resources to incinerate drifters like us. People who could afford to breathe real oxygen and drink real water on the shore of some space beach under the light of two or three glorious suns did not like to be reminded that we were out here, floating amongst the asteroids, just hoping we had enough scrap metal to trade in for another day’s supply of fuel. We were always asking for air to breathe, water to drink, and hell, maybe even some real food, and they hated us because of it.
As we emerged, a burnt, brackish smell rose from the ship. Underneath me, my knees buckled, and I fell to the ground. My hands sank into dark silt. Harris was massaging his shoulder, and I saw him biting his lip through the plastic screen of the helmet that pumped low-grade, synthetic oxygen into his lungs. He looked up to the sky, which was the color of a storm. A thick cloud drifted past a mountaintop, uncovering the sliver of a moon.
I heard the sharp click of Harris removing his helmet. He tucked it under his arm, his shoulders sagged as he inhaled, and a shiver of pleasure rushed down his spine. His laughter echoed into the deserted, rocky plane we stood on. “I can breathe!” He said.
With less than an eighth of a tank remaining, we had found this place, a tiny, blue planet, mostly ocean with an emerald of land in the middle.
It seemed too good to be true; at any moment, drones could emerge from behind the mountains, their missiles targeting us before we even heard the metallic hum of their engines. I put my hands on either side of my helmet and felt my chest tighten, wondering if I dared.
by submission | Jun 21, 2016 | Story |
Author : Harris Tobias
The night Janet saw the UFO was the night she threw Frank out of her life. She had just finished dumping all his stuff—clothes, records, comic book collection—into several black plastic garbage bags and placed them on the lawn in a neat row. Let him come home to that, the miserable excuse for a man. She’d had a hell of a day— a visit to Planned Parenthood with her mom. Frank was too busy to or too squeamish to be present, the hypocrite. His idea of fatherhood didn’t extend any further than the end of his penis, the prick.
The plastic bags looked like aliens lined up on the lawn in front of the trailer. Their shiny black skins reflecting the moonlight. Just four bags. That was all it took to get him out of her life. Four bags and four plastic tubs of comic books. Franks precious comic book collection. The only thing he really cared about.
How could she have ever expected anything more from a big baby like Frank? Already the trailer seemed more open, more room to breathe, more space both physically and emotionally. Goodbye and good riddance, Janet breathed the first breaths of un-oppressed air in two years and she liked the way it felt.
Comic books. What a metaphor for her life. Her life read like a tawdry magazine filled with every cliche in the book. Frank cared more for his comics than anything else. He’d spend hours with them. “They’re going to take care of us in our old age,” he would say as though that justified the time he spent. How could someone be so anal about one thing and a complete slob about another? He’d leave the rooms a filthy mess but his precious collection was the example of organization, every book lovingly covered in plastic, labeled, cataloged and filed away for posterity. And where was the prick now? At some stupid comic convention.
He lived in a fantasy world, a comic book world of super heroes and impossible villains. Impossible things, that’s what Frank believed in. That’s why they could never get along because, deep down, she was a practical girl who liked practical things, real things, like a regular paycheck and regular meals. Silly, regular stuff like that. That’s why she was the one with the stupid job while Frank read the want ads and comic books.
When every last bit of Frank’s stuff was outside, it began to rain. Janet went in and fixed herself a seven and seven and sat down at the tiny table in the tiny kitchen. She looked out of the window. She could see Frank’s stuff outside in the moonlight lined up like an invading army of dumpy alien ninjas and laughed to herself. Frank would appreciate that image.
She was having her second drink when she saw it. At first she thought it was the moon, it was so bright and round and other worldly, but the shape was wrong and it was moving horizontally across the sky very slowly, behaving in a most un-moonlike way. The object hovered over the trailer park for a while then darted away as if spooked by something. A UFO, Janet thought to herself almost giddy with the novelty of it. Frank would be jealous that he wasn’t here to see it. I saw a UFO she thought just before the tears came.
by submission | Jun 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
“We noticed from orbit,” said the commander of the fleet form Quijote III, “that you have quite the renovation project going on here, and we have to commend you. Taking on a project of that scale is very admirable. And the foresight that involves! I think we could learn a thing or two from you.”
Earth’s emissary simply stared, slightly frightened at his own confusion. “I… well, I just… what?”
The alien commander stared back. “You know. The warming project. I think it’s very innovative.”
The chattering in the crowd behind them had stopped, the camera flashes becoming more infrequent. “I’m afraid I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” the representative said.
The commander gave what sounded like a series of low belches, the equivalent of a Quijotese chuckle. “Surely you’re aware of the carbon dioxide you’re emitting into the atmosphere, warming the climate and warding off the approaching Ice Age? You see, we don’t have the climate cycles allowing for such a catastrophic event on Quijote III, but I hope we would have come up with the same solution you did. Really remarkable move. You do know, don’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” the now extremely nervous delegate said to the esteemed alien visitor. “I know.” He raised his communicator to his mouth, and asked his supervising officer, watching in the crowd somewhere, “What should I tell him?”
“Play along,” the officer said from the back of the crowd, sweating abundantly and tapping his foot in an anxious twitch. “Let him think we’re doing it on purpose. We can deal with the media later.”
After the emissary chuckled and subtly bragged about humanity’s little “engineering project,” the crowd roared angrily at the lie, shouting about the treachery of Earth’s government. The confused Quijotese official was led back to his space-to-surface shuttle and ushered back to his starship, sent away before it got too violent… and before he figured out what was going on.
by submission | Jun 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The sound of the ship’s klaxons faded over a span of a minute.
“Air pressure is at zero, Captain,” Ramirez heard a female voice say in south Vietnamese accented English from the speakers of his space helmet. “We’re in hard vacuum throughout the vessel.”
Typical Consortium tactic, thought Ramirez. Having the crew don spacesuits before the engagement was the right decision. Ramirez looked at the twelve men and women whose faces showed fear and despair emerging from a thinning facade of courage and determination.
“They’ll be boarding the Juneau any minute,” said Ramirez. He was surprised at how even his voice sounded given the fear he felt. “McKinney, rig the reactor to blow. Be sure to take out both the primary and secondary coolant systems. Novikova, weld as many of the hard point contacts around the reactor as you can so the Consortium won’t be able to jettison the reactor before it detonates. Hurry!”
The two ran down the corridor.
“Captain, in case your bluff to destroy the ship doesn’t work, I suggest we take up defensive positions in the–”
“I’m not bluffing, Nguyen. We are destroying the ship. That’s why we’re leaving. Now.”
The captain led the crew to the nearest airlock and began cycling the chamber.
“Go to camo mode as you emerge. And follow me,” said the captain.
The spacesuited figures became all but invisible as they floated out the airlock. The surfaces of their spacesuits were covered with countless microscopic cameras and projectors. Any given surface displayed an image of what the microcameras on the opposite side of the suit was seeing. After three minutes, they reached the Consortium ship’s port stardrive impeller.
“Iqbal, can you hack into this ship’s sensor net?”
“From the outside, Captain? I don’t think so. If we could get inside and I could establish a direct connection to their intranet, then maybe.”
“What if you could plug into their communication array?”
Iqbal consider the idea. “Their com-array to their quantum entanglement switch to their main metaprocessor and then access the sensor net. Roundabout way to do it, but it would work. But without that direct connection…”
Iqbal fell silent as he saw Ramirez pointing at a thin rod that jutted out from the impeller’s housing. A secondary hyperwave antenna. Iqbal smiled.
“Engine’s sabotaged, Captain,” said a voice in Ramirez’ helmet. “She’ll go in about ten minutes.”
“Abandon ship. Go camo and meet us at the enemy vessel’s port impeller.” Ramirez turned back to Iqbal. “Go!”
Seven minutes later, a dozen men and women watched Iqbal furiously tapping at the control panel on the left forearm of his spacesuit from which a data-cable extended to the base of the hyperwave antenna.
With a tired voice, Iqbal said, “It’s done. They think their port impeller is about to go singularity. They’re abandoning ship.” Thirty seconds later: “Internal sensors show no one’s on board. They’re all either on our ship or en route there.”
“Iqbal, quickly!” said Ramirez looking back at his doomed vessel. “We’ve only got a few seconds until–”
Before the captain could finish his sentence the Juneau appeared to recede into the distance until it could no longer be seen. A few seconds later a new star seemed to flare momentarily in the heavens.
“I switched on the impeller drive for 50 nanoseconds,” said Iqbal. “We were close enough to the ship to be inside the field’s inertial reference frame.”
“Muy simpatico, Iqbal,” said Ramirez with a smile. “How about opening an airlock?”
“One minute, please, Captain”. Nguyen was burning “Juneau II” into the hull with her sidearm.
