by submission | Jun 7, 2016 | Story |
Author : Michael F. da Silva
The siege lasted two years and we were about ready to throw in the towel by then.
We had no air support, had been pushed back to the fortified bunkers all the way from the enemy’s beachheads and under heavy shelling. It was taking a toll on our morale. Not only that, but the last we heard from GalCom said that fourteen other incursions had been made all over Human space. FUBAR, as the expression went.
Local command tried to keep our spirits up by keeping up a steady trickle of low-scale sallies. When Espareth ships were too far off on the other side of the planet for close air support, we’d hit their ground forces with everything we had and charged them fast enough for blade work. We made good advantage of the hardened tunnel systems for that. Something GalCom got from the history books about static defence and asymmetric warfare.
Near the end though, we were about done. We were low on ammunition and able bodies. The civil engineers were holding the water replenishment systems together with spit and baling wire. There were a few cases of dysentery whose rumours couldn’t be quashed before some of the civilian authorities started to push for surrender. I have to hand it to Colonel Abrahamson. That man was a rock for the duration.
And you can bet he was just as glad as anyone else when a relief task force broke through. The Espareth had spread their forces too far too fast across Human territory and their contain-and-invest strategy hadn’t worked as well as they had hoped.
I was right there with the mechanised infantry brigades when the blast doors opened outward fifty clicks Northeast of New Lisbon. Colonel Abrahamson was the age-old avatar of chivalric glory as he carried the sky-blue banner over the crest himself in his own gauntleted hands.
We pay homage now, assembled in full regalia in front of that same gate, two years later. The military band plays solemn tune as the banners sway in the breeze in front of the Abrahamson Cenotaph. He fell in that final battle that annihilated the remnants of the invasion force. His was the death to which every great soldier aspires; in victorious battle.
There is popular support for renaming this rock after the Colonel. Worlds should be named for those who sacrificed the most to build them, people say. No matter what the Colonial Office says, we will always know this is Abrahamson’s World.
by submission | May 31, 2016 | Story |
Author : Jonathan K. Harline
Darkness, and then the roar of the Earth being torn into dust.
I wake up sweating and panting every time. I spend the whole first minute catching my breath, heart racing and mind stalled from panic.
At the second minute I look out my window, at the Sun as it appears to swell. The sky takes on a red and orange hue, like at sunset. I can’t help but think the same things again and again. The temperature starts to rise, but it’s nothing unbearable, nothing ominous. Anyone who has bothered to look up probably thinks they’re seeing things. Only I know what’s going on. At two minutes and thirty seconds, I’m running to the loft apartment I rent above my own. It takes me seventeen seconds every time. I’m panting again so I pause and breathe.
No one expected it to happen this soon. I try to think about why. Speculative theories fly through my brain, some old, some new. Sometimes I really think I’m on to something, but at four minutes and thirteen seconds I remind myself it doesn’t matter if I’m going to die.
I sprint to my workstation and open the access panel on the prototype of my Time/Space Adjustment Device. I throw the cube of uranium in, not even stopping to worry about the radiation I’ve absorbed from handling it without gloves. It burns my hand slightly, like a sun burn. I glance out the large floor to ceiling windows in the loft. The sky is pale and hazy, and it looks like the sun has come to pay its third child a visit. I’m exaggerating every time I think that the heat is increasing exponentially as the sun grows.
It’s around five and a half minutes that I get around to throwing the dark matter into its slot on the other side of the access panel. Hundreds of years of work across three generations, and this is all we have. Turn back the clock a handful of minutes – enough to claim a verifiable result, but not enough to do anything with it. Enough to fix one mistake. Never enough to solve the problem of the sun.
The machine hums. It has to warm up. I set the Temporal/Spacial coordinates. I always stop to think.
Seven minutes.
One last minute to try to figure out how to stop the destruction of the planet. A planet that, without my interference, has already died tens, hundreds, thousands of time.
One last minute spent trying to figure out how to give myself more time. How many of those minutes have I already spent – wasted – trying to figure out what, or who, made the sun explode.
I stop.
I reach out and shut off the machine.
No turning back now. I’ve already died hundreds of time, and I’ve never seen what happens next.
I look at my watch.
Five,
Four,
Three,
Two,
One,
Darkness, and the roar of the Earth being torn into dust.
by submission | May 30, 2016 | Story |
Author : Tyra Tanner
It is the blue hour.
That space between twilight and full dark when night’s silhouettes press flat against the horizon. Pines stretch their jagged limbs blackly above eye level, like a claw-marked rip in the canvas of the coming night.
Sometimes, at this hour, I find myself wandering the forgotten roads near the observatory tower, its darkened windows and barred gates reminder of what was lost.
Sitting on the curb, I watch the stars emerge. One. Two. Three. Ten. The blue hour descends into darkness, night consuming it in a giant swallow, so that all at once, the sky is full of stars.
I imagine them, then.
Pretend I can see their star out of the thousands, millions, billions in the sky.
It would be a little above the horizon, somewhere to the right, and my eyes would scan, scan, until I would find it, there, glowing slightly blue, because it was so large and hot and ready to burst at the seams.
600 lightyears away.
But it’s not there.
Not anymore.
The star was how we found them, though. The others.
It was on the list of those ripe for supernova.
A small detour in my day’s agenda led me to tweak the VLT in the observatory tower to take note of the orbiting bodies that would be affected by the star’s demise.
Even as I jotted the planets down on a list, noting the predicted path of galactic destruction, I didn’t immediately recognize what I was seeing. It was only after multiple shots and comparisons that I knew what lay before my eyes.
Life.
The planet was smaller than Earth, farther from its star, and full of life.
From mighty trees that dwarfed the Redwoods to turbulent oceans that crashed against the shores, to sunbaked dunes that swallowed miles of land, the planet teemed with energy and movement.
And perhaps most interesting were the tall structures, sloping yet firm, that suggested a tool-making species walked the land.
357 days I had watched them.
That’s when the star exploded, taking the planet and all of its neighbors with it.
The clearest image we were able to retrieve before their demise suggested a six-limbed creature, tall and wide. I wish I could have seen its eyes, but the planet was too far, the telescope too weak.
What bothers me the most, when I wander outside of the closed observatory, the funding ceased after the others died and we lost hope of contact, was that they didn’t die recently. They died 600 years ago. That’s how long it took for the light to reach us and tell us their story.
But for 357 days, we weren’t alone in the universe. We were viewers from afar, witnesses of the limitless power of chemical composition to form intelligent life. They’ll never know I walk the blue hour and mourn them.
In the silence that pervades the night, I slip my old key from my pocket, enter the observatory grounds, and jog up the hill to the tower. On the balcony rim, I turn on my flashlight, my finger tapping against the switch, a simple morse code that brightens the metal dome behind me in flashes and spurts.
‘We wait for night,’ I tap. ‘From dawn to dusk, species to species. We are here. We are here. We are here.’
I can’t help but hope that someone is watching us right now.
by submission | May 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
Her mouth opens wide, eyes squeezed shut in a show of agony, teeth bared, then suddenly comes to a stop. The moment of her death slows to a crawl, like time itself is standing still. They say this is what it’s like to see someone die. Everything just slows down as you watch the person breathe their last breath, say their last goodbye, or simply scream, scream as death carries them off into the night.
But I hear no scream, and time isn’t just standing still as a metaphor. She drifts only feet from where I clutch to the hatch combing, frozen in place, dying for eternity. Moments pass and still she hangs motionless in the air, a silent scream frozen on her agonized face, covered with the helmet of her bio-suit. They told us not to come aboard the station, that the alien technology had yet to be identified. But with our ship low on fuel, and what did they expect a salvage crew like ours to do? “Unidentified alien tech” might as well read “solid gold.”
We should have listened. Now I can only wait futilely by the locked hatch and stare into my own future. The time dilation field keeps expanding, inch by inch. First the radios went out, leaving us in silence. Then her hand become stuck to the tiny device. Even then she was screaming, wrenching her body against the device trying to her hand free. Then it slowly enveloped her, freezing her forever in the final moments of her death. Frozen to the world for all eternity, yet dying in an instant on the inside. At least that’s what I hope. It’s the only hope I have as the field slowly crawls closer to where I drift.
My flashlight is the next thing to freeze. I dropped it when the commotion started and it drifted in the weightless corridor, waiting to be snatched. I can see now that it has stopped drifting, hanging motionless just a few feet away. I see the rays of light it cast as a sheet of glass hanging in the air, and wonder for a moment what this says about the age old “particle” vs. “wave” debate. This is the last intellectual thought I have before the field finally expands and envelopes me as well.
“Nooooooooo!” her voice suddenly rings in my ears through the radio. The sheet of light is gone, replaced by simple, invisible rays once again. Looking up, I see that her face no longer holds the silent scream, but only a look of puzzlement and confusion.
“You…” she starts to say, pointing to where I floated when she was first frozen, then to where I am now near the hatch combing.
I open my mouth to speak, but then the entire ship shutters. We drop like flies to the ground as the artificial gravity kicks back on. I end up somewhere to left of where I floated, and find my feet quickly. We’re used to this sort of thing on our rickety salvage ship. But here?
“What’s going on?” my companion asks, before a voice cuts her off, overriding our radios.
“Welcome, travelers,” the voice says. “Welcome to the end of the universe.”
A light flashes out the small window to my right, and I join my companion in gazing out into the unfamiliar space beyond. The stars are gone, as is our ship. Outside, we see nothing but a tiny speck of a light in the distance, which flickers violently for a moment then disappears.
“The end of the universe?” I say, looking out into the nothingness that once held the entire cosmos.
“Yes,” the voice says. “The end of one universe, and the start of another.”
There is another flash of light, a tremendous force pushing against the hull of the ship, and then nothing but white. This time there are no screams, only two quiet gasps, before the birth of the new universe carries us away.
by submission | May 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : Iain Macleod
“I still dont get it, man.” The youngster looked up at the grizzled older man. A drilling veteran of over twenty years he looked like an old bear with a hangover. “Go over it again”
“Come on, new blood. It’s not that hard. How did you even get through your training without knowing this stuff?”
The younger man shrugged. Fresh out of his industry training and as green as any new hand could be.
“Ok, it breaks down like this. The speed of light is an inviolable rule. We cant get around it despite our best efforts, nobody can figure out a work around to get us out into deep space and back again in a useful timeframe. All those useful and valuable commodities floating in the vastness completely out of our reach.”
The older man took a deep drink from his pint before continuing.
“That is until Dr Heuring and his crew of science nerds started messing around with time travel.”
“Yeah, thats the bit i dont get, why does time travel help get us with space travel? Sounds back assward to me”
“Christ.”
“Come on, man. Just help me understand”
“I swear you green hands get dumber every year.”
The younger man said nothing.
“Ok, The earth rotates around the sun, right? The sun is rotating around galactic centre. Everything is constantly in motion. Six months from now the earth will be on the other side of the sun and not where it is right now.”
“Right. So?”
“So, when you jump in time your position in space stays the same but what is here now isnt what was here then. For example, 100 million years ago this location in space was taken up by a massive helium cloud in the carina sagitarius arm of the milky way. That’s where they send those dicks on the Heliakos Bravo rig to.”
The old vet knocked back another shot and lit up a smoke.
“We’ve been watching the skies for generations and can fairly accurately figure out from where things are now where they might have been in the past. Once they figure out the time we need to go back to they get a crew of nuggets like you and me together and send us out to collect, drill or harvest in some way whatever resources to make whatever garbage humanity is producing these days”
“25 million years ago: asteroid with huge lithium and other rare earth deposits. Thats where the Beryl Rigs are based. 65 millions years ago, vast water ice reserves on another asteroid. Methane, organic compounds, gold, iron, copper, loads of stuff really over various times”
“You understanding this, new blood?”
Through the haze of smoke the older vet could see the younger mans glazed expression and could tell he had lost him.
“uhh..sure. Yeah, i got it now, boss”
The veteran grinned. ‘Was i ever as hopeless as this?’ he thought to himself.
“Look, just keep yourself safe out there. Do whatever the older guys tell you to do and you’ll be ok.”
“Thanks, boss”
“No worries, kid. Now get me another drink. I’ve never made a jump sober and i dont intend to start now”
