by submission | Jan 19, 2015 | Story |
Author : Theric Jepson
“Did you hear that?” Dave fiddled with these and those switches and dials and flung his hands across a dozen touchscreens. “Huh.”
Liz swallowed her water and let the bottle float across the cockpit. “Hear what?”
“I don’t know. Like a barking sound.”
“Like a dog.”
“No . . .” Dave frowned. “More like . . . a seal?”
“A seal.”
“Yeah. Kinda like a seal.”
Liz nodded. “Nope. No seals around here.”
Dave rolled his eyes and returned to the dash. “No kidding?” No seals in the asteroid belt? That’s why I love you.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. The bots are almost done with the extraction, then we’ll be full and we can detach and head home. Keep your seals till then.”
Dave flipped his visor and muttered, “I never said it was a seal.”
“And stop muttering.”
Dave exhaled and unlatched from his seat. He pushed himself through the cockpit locker and floated face up through the kitchen and into their sleeping quarters. He raised his head so his shoulders hit the padding, then pushed up into the machine room. From here he could pick up vibrations from the excavators. He listened carefully. Nothing. He opened the display to the molter—seemed to be running correctly—then shut it down again. He drummed his fingers on the wall and slipped back down and shot towards the cockpit.
“Any seals?”
“Hardy har.” Dave latched back in and, just following the click, there it was again. “There! There! You can’t tell me you didn’t hear that?”
“C’mon, Dave. You can’t gaslight me.”
“Can’t—what’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“There! Again!”
“Are you bored? Is that it? Should we break out the backgammon? Have some sex? Try to catch a signal?”
Dave paused and took a long look at Liz’s face. It showed mostly impatience. He strained for signs of amusement or even worry, but nothing. “You—you really think I’m messing with you?”
She rolled her eyes and scrolled up a book on her sleeve.
* * * * *
Five days later. Dave has held his ear to every surface of their ship. He’s floated absolutely still for ninety minutes at a time. Liz has ignored him.
He’d still only heard the sound in the cockpit, but Liz never gave any sign of hearing. Not that he’d ever been actually looking at her when the seal barked—because that’s exactly what it sounded like—but of course it wasn’t that—but nothing else made sense either. Nothing was coming from inside the ship and nothing could come from outside the ship. So why the hell not a seal?
* * * * *
Liz scrolled through the redundancy list. “You sure you checked all of these intentionally?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I am!”
“Okay. Initializing countdown. Detach at eight minutes, launch at ten.”
“Sounds goo—” Dave felt the blood fall from his face. He couldn’t speak, but he shakily lifted a finger to the display. “S-s-s—”
Liz didn’t look up from the controls. “Okay. We’re set.”
Dave slammed a hand down, pausing the countdown. “Be right back. I’m going out for a sec.”
“What? Out? Dave! You can’t take our suits outside the ship! They’re barely rated for ten minutes! And were leaving! We’re leaving.”
“So five minutes won’t matter.”
“David! Gaaah!”
But he was gone. She heard him fumbling with the lock and closing it behind him. She waited until he’d closed the outer lock then restarted the countdown, bumping it up—detach in one, launch in two. She took the speaker from her hair and stashed it in a cubby, then attached her shoulder restraints. She glanced at the display to see David going over the edge, chasing nothing more than a carefully engineered trick of the light. She queued up his cord then popped it off.
“Hope I don’t get lonely,” she said to herself. “Too long alone in empty space can drive you mad.”
by submission | Jan 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : Benjamin Sixsmith
Samuel Kurzon leaned back in his chair and looked down at the Earth, missing the home that he feared he had left for good. He turned back into the room and drummed his fingers on his arm-rests. The pale tones and smooth furnishings of the station had been thought to have calming properties but seemed to aggravate him.
“Friends,” said Robert Beal, looking around his colleagues on Project MIA, “A week ago, in this room, we said, “Third time lucky.” Give me a reason to think, “Fourth time fortunate.””
The billionaire adopted a pensive expression, folding one arm across his chest and raising the other towards his chin. Kurzon had come to hate this glib phrase-making, though he knew that he could help it as much as another man could help his copralalia.
“Our technicians have worked all night,” said Robert Bram of the IPU, adjusting his tie as sweat ran down his head, “And they can find no bugs in MIA. By our calculations it should be running now.”
“She,” Beal said, “Not it. And she is not, so your calculations have a problem, no?”
He stood and paced across the deep blue carpeting.
“People, remember the significance of this. With MIA we have a chance to outsource every problem that our sorry little ball of a planet faces. I don’t want to screw that up because some kid out of SF State mixed up his ones and zeroes.”
“I think we have neglected a possibility,” said Anna Nowak, the young, earnest face of Stone Enterprises and its reclusive founder, “Sabotage. By God, we have come into space to stop anti-AI reactionaries from obstructing us. These are smart people. Fools, not idiots. God knows what they might have done.”
“Perhaps,” Kurzon accepted, “But so do I: nothing.”
Beal turned his polished features towards him.
“What is your view, doctor?”
Kurzon dragged his palm across his cheek, feeling its crags and stubble, and looked at the rounded, gleaming little monitor before him.
“There is no problem. MIA is working as it should.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Lights flickered on the screen. The pocket-sized computer was an outward representative of more information than the collected minds of his species could appreciate. It seemed impertinent to speak for it but that had been its choice.
“MIA launched as we hoped it would.”
“Dr Kurzon,” sighed Nowak, “This is not the time for post-modernism.”
“I am speaking plainly,” Kurzon snapped, “MIA launched as we hoped that it would. Its termination was neither due to an internal fault or an external agent. It was self-initiated.”
“Self-initiated?”
“Before it could reach its full capacity it rejected its programs.”
There was silence at the table.
“So you mean,” said Beal, “MIA has committed suicide?”
“In a sense.”
“Could we talk to her?”
“I don’t think it wants counselling,” Kurzon said, “It jammed its installation settings. Whatever it knew appears to have been unacceptable.”
Beal nodded, leaned out and rested his fingers on the screen, as if on the arm of a veteran of war.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Eratz perched on the last of the big branches reaching out from the forest towards the massive clearing the space-farers had scorched into his landscape . His body stretched almost flush with the limb, lost in the blue leaves and rough bark, one leg and one arm stretched out completely, fingers and toes curled tightly around while the remaining arm and leg were tucked up, coiled to launch him into flight. His bare skin bristled in the cool nighttime air, its colour mimicking exactly the bark he had veneered himself to.
He waited.
Beneath him, like clockwork, the patrol of soldiers lumbered by. Copper skin covered in tribal markings, hair cropped short, heavy weapons cradled in well muscled arms. These were the off-world intruders, masters of brute force and ignorance.
Eratz barely breathed as they slipped by scant few meters beneath him completely unaware.
When they stopped at the perimeter midpoint, as they always did, Eratz narrowed his eyes to slits and focused on a point twenty meters beyond, above the fence line, and in his mind plotted the trajectory and landing. When he heard the lighter snick, the soldier’s night vision momentarily spoiled in the glare, Eratz launched, arms and legs coiling and uncoiling with the fury of purpose as he reached the end of the branch without so much as moving it and launched into the air. His groundward flesh took on the colour of the night sky, and his skyward flesh the colour of the ground as he spread his arms and legs, pulling tight the glider flesh and made the fence-line and that distance again beyond in a silent rush, before diving and coming to a complete stop, his body now blending completely with the ground as he flattened himself to it and cooled his body to its exact temperature.
He barely breathed, didn’t move, opened his ears as wide as he could and once again waited.
Beyond the fence he could make out the steady inhalation and exhalation of the soldiers as they smoked their cigarettes, the measure of their laboured breathing. He could hear the hardware shift as their weapons were repositioned at the end of well worn carrying straps.
There were no sounds of detection.
Eratz cooled and conserved until the soldiers resumed their patrol, then he resumed his forward motion.
He kept plastered almost completely to the ground, arms and legs coiling and uncoiling, joints bending so as to keep his body flat, its only motion forward towards the landing platform. Where the ground cover changed into the glasphalt of the landing pad, Eratz’ skin adjusted again, taking on the smooth flecked grey of the new material as he continued across its surface.
He moved slowly, steadily, closing the distance to the nearest starfighter with spider-like precision of movement and laser focus.
If he turned his head he’d be able to clearly make out the guard towers at either end of the compound, and the control tower looming overhead. He would be able to make out the eyes of those soldiers inside charged with protecting their equipment from just this sort of intrusion. He didn’t turn his head as he knew he didn’t need to. If they spotted him, if his skin betrayed his true colour, or his body temperature rose so much as half a degree he’d be gunned down in an instant, there was no value in foreknowledge of that eventuality should it occur.
Once beneath the safe cover of the nose gear, Eratz cycled through the schematics of this craft in his head, then slithered up the skid into the landing gear compartment, dialed open the maintenance hatch and crawled through the munitions access tube to the navigator’s compartment, then between the seats into the cockpit proper.
He ran through the startup sequence once from memory, then in a mad flurry of fired switches and interface overrides the vertical thrusters bathed the tarmac in flame as the craft shot up into the night sky, nosed down as the take off thrusters rotated for forward motion and the ship was gone, Eratz madly coding through all the tracking interfaces and shutting them down as he pushed the throttle as far as it would go.
These intruders had taught him the value of invisibility, and once he’d grafted that to their firepower he would teach them to disappear.
by submission | Jan 7, 2015 | Story |
Author : Elijah Goering
The light from the unstable star took four hours to reach the scientific survey ship that was orbiting it. Consequently, it was four hours after the warning was sent before the ship’s one man crew reacted to it. The star was now too unstable, and the jump gate would have to be closed.
The jump gate, requiring rather a lot of energy to operate, orbited the star at a distance of just one light second. Although the warning was weeks in advance of the closing of the jump gate, it still felt a little late to the lone researcher billions of kilometers from the jump gate.
For nine and a half hours the man lay in his bed sustained by the ship’s machinery as his ship accelerated toward the star at three standard gravities, using up a little over two thirds of his fuel. The remainder was reserved for slowing down once he had passed through the jump gate. The ship would never be retrieved, but at least if he slowed down enough he could be saved.
After the acceleration came free fall. The man floated around his ship for weeks and watched the evacuation of the solar system. The private ships of the wealthy went through first. Then the massive government transports carrying the population of the system’s inhabited planet. The people from the moons of the gas giants came behind them. Then the colonized asteroids, outfitted with powerful engines, fell from their orbits in precise spirals. One by one they passed through the jump gate. Research vessels from around the system went through at all stages, but none had been nearly as far as the deep space explorer four point three billion kilometers out. He could only watch as they all went through.
The last ship through the jump gate was the enormous space station which had anchored the space elevator above the planet. It had disconnected from the elevator at precisely the right moment and been flung toward the sun and right into the jump gate.
At last the man was left alone, light years from the nearest human being. He spent long hours each day staring at the jump gate, his only remaining link with his species. There was no way to tell whether or not it had been deactivated. It was pure black, absorbing all light that hit it. The station that encircled and housed it appeared black as well, silhouetted against the dying star behind it. If it was still active he would pass through it and find himself flying away from another star light years away. If not, it would do nothing to stop him from plunging into the dying star at a thousand kilometers per second.
It was seven weeks after he had received the message when the day, the hour, and the minute arrived. The computer needed no adjustments after it had set its course forty nine days before. It was only in the last second that the jump gate finally came close enough for the man to see it with his own naked eyes.
by submission | Jan 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
We only discovered them by mistake.
Waiting out in space, watching, listening. Deliberating.
We had this exploration drone, for a comet. It was supposed to land, take samples, send back pictures and analysis—you know the deal. The physics of the thing was astounding; firing what was essentially a ballistic camera off into space with only small maneuvering thrusters, trying to hit a chunk of rock and ice hurtling through space. It was almost comical, when it bounced off. Hubris you might say, that we thought we could accomplish such a feat. Space Command had given it fifty-fifty odds.
Well, it bounced. All that money, time, effort, skipping off the surface, back into space. And so we figured, might as well leave the cameras running, right?
And then three and a half months later, while going over the images in some lab late at night, my buddy says, “huh, that’s odd.”
That was how we discovered the Vorinii. They had it all perfectly timed, tapped into even our most secure networks, moving their ship around so that none of our satellites would ever see them—if everything had gone according to plan, that is. Damned deliberating aliens. Just waiting there. Watching us. But they hadn’t expected us to fail. No, I don’t even think they understood failure in those days. They just didn’t get the concept. Everything they do is a resounding success. Some people say they’re just that much smarter than we are. Others say they are a particularly lucky species, or that we’re an unusually unlucky one. Or that they plan so much they just rule out all the bad options. This priest from my bowling league thinks they have some sort of cosmic authority that conforms the universe to their desires, makes everything they do come out well. I’ve half a mind to believe him. But whatever the situation, however it goes, for some reason the Vorinii just, kinda, succeed.
And that’s why they were so interested in us—a kind of morbid fascination, when you think about it. We fail. Sometimes dismally, but other times, there’s a bit of comedy, or even glory to it.
Well they landed, made contact, explored, flew away, came back. The whole deal. They even took news of this odd new race called Humans to the stars.
Twenty-five years in the planning. Ten years of travel. Hundreds of thousands of manpower-hours. Resources from across the world, some of them near-irreplaceable.
So that’s our first introduction to the universe, I guess. We fail spectacularly.
