by submission | Apr 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill, of 14
The crimson clothed hunter stood leaning against a large boulder smoking a cigar lazily, his pointed brown fedora angled towards the ground to ward off any unnecessary light. His outfit was a mismatched black and red military formal with large collars and buttons, it gave him quite a distinct look.
“Oi, there’s one.” came the soft voice of his partner, Alexander Flynn.
The hunter nodded slowly and brought his rusted metal and wooden rifle up. Quite an old bolt-action firearm, but he was proud of it. He had even named it the Norbrück. Peering at the sky he looked for what Alexander had indicated, and finally found it. A singular long squid-like entity floated loftily through clouds, looking around lazily with a single wide eye. It had a thin, almost invisible, chain anchoring it to the ground. These creatures were called the Avial by the locals, magnificent beasts said to keep the planet from falling into the vast void of nothingness known as space.
Shouldering his antiquated rifle the hunter peered through the slightly offset scope. “Probably a five, maybe even six hundred pounder.” he said quietly and did a quick mental calculation. “That would fetch around 10,000 credits with the Keitl.”
“By all means, shoot it.” said Alexander excitedly, looking at the squid in anticipation.
“I plan to, son.” replied the hunter evenly.
The Avial traced lazy circles in the sky ponderously, it was a wonder they even managed to stay afloat.
After a few seconds of steadying his rifle and controlling his breathing patterns the hunter let loose a single round. The bullet sailed through the air in a minor arch and eventually impacted the squid-like creature directly in the side, sending it spiraling out of control. The Avial folded in upon its self and careened towards the ground. After many seconds of falling the squid contacted the ground with a sickening thud, the two men surged towards it to claim their prize. Stepping over rocks and leaping across crevasses the hunter and his partner located the gelatinous body of the dead creature with its thin chain trailing off into the distance.
“Good shot.” said Alexander, crouching beside the Avial with wide eyes.
“Easy shot.” the hunter amended. “Get that thing compressed and packed up, I want to make it back to the Hinterlands before night to bag a couple of snow whales.”
With a brief nod Alexander set to work at storing and preserving the game.
The hunter cycled the bolt and chambered another round in his rifle, peering up at the sky which had grown ominously dark.
“How big do these things get, Alex?”
“I dunno. There were some stories from this planet’s mythology that spoke of some many miles wide.” he replied in a bored tone still working on the Avial.
A huge chain with impossibly vast links appeared on the horizon, spiraling up into space and eventually connecting to an enormous blue spear-like blotch which was descending quickly towards the surface.
“How much do you think that one would fetch on the Keitl market?” asked the hunter in a queer tone.
Alexander looked up slowly, searching for another of the squid. His eyes finally widened in understanding.
Soon enough the giant Avial blocked out the whole sky, extending long tendrils of electricity towards the hunter and his partner.
“I think I’m going to need a larger caliber.” said the hunter matter-of-factly.
by submission | Apr 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jason Frank
Breikf was heading back with a fresh beer and he looked over where they had the lead space man all trussed up so anybody wanted could get a kick in. Everybody got in a bunch, looked like. Breikf sure had, but just then something in the cool of the evening and the beers got him thinking. He set down by the space man.
“You understand me?” he asked.
“I do,” the space man said.
“You know this is all your fault, right? All this that just happened and all that that’s going to happen now is your fault.”
“I most assuredly do not know that. We simply came here_”
“We weren’t always this hard. It was you all made us this way.”
“We have had very little contact with your people.” the space man said.
“You know what a dog is, right? I’d call my pup on over to show you up close but he’d damn likely try to get his share of you.”
“We are familiar with your companion species.”
“That’s good, you being familiar and all. That helps me get this story across. See, my dad always said there was one sure way to turn a dog mean. You start with a free dog, one can go anywhere any time and do what it wants. You make that free dog a chained dog, twenty foot of chain. Make that twenty foot chained dog a fifteen foot chained dog. Make that fifteen foot chained dog a ten foot chained dog. Make that ten foot chained dog a five foot chained dog and that five foot chained dog’s a mean one, no doubt about it. Now see, what you all done, what you started on long before you came down here, was cut down and cut down how much we could get around. You blocked us off at the end of the old Milky and then pushed us back till we just had this solar system. And now you come on in here? That was a mistake. Didn’t work out too well for you, did it? You ain’t dealt with dogs as mean as us.”
The bound and bruised alien said nothing.
“And now you see over there, you see that big ship of yours, biggest we ever seen? See that taking off? Well we stuffed that ship wall to wall with the meanest dogs we got. Now they’re heading back to whatever kind of fleet you got out there with their distress signals all on blast. We’ll see what happens up there now. Dog will hunt.”
Breikf set a short spell but didn’t talk more. He finished up his beer and got up to get another. The captive didn’t talk either. He imagined the fleet’s reactions. It was likely that their plan would succeed. Little preparation had been done for situations like these. No standard responses to unreasonable barbarian advance had been formulated. He thought about this wild horde tearing out across the civilized systems he had loved so well. These images did what a hundred some steel toed boots couldn’t; the space man quivered with weeping.
by submission | Apr 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
A thin cloud of red dust trailed behind Orton’s motorcycle. I’m running out of time, he thought to himself as he rode across Cydonia Mensae. The temperature was already down to -40 degrees Celsius and continued steadily dropping. The sun would be setting in less than an hour and it wouldn’t be safe to be outside after dark. Even after almost two decades of economic malaise, political disintegration, and finally open warfare, Orton had a hard time believing how seriously the situation on Mars had deteriorated.
It hadn’t always been that way. After the Nanotech Revolution of the twenty-eighties, space travel finally became cheap, fast, and safe, and while habitats in Earth orbit and on the surface of the Moon had their appeal, Mars was the true frontier. The cycle from flags and footprints missions to destination for wealthy adventurers to scientific outposts to genuine communities had progressed quickly, catalyzed by inexpensive and reliable space technology and the promise of a new beginning.
Orton slowed his motorcycle to a crawl and looked behind him. No sign of pursuit, he thought. A sensor sweep would have been much more accurate and comprehensive, of course. But a scan would have given his position away instantly. Even with the motorcycle’s stealth devices operating, it was a miracle he had eluded detection this long. He could just make out the dome in the distance. It would be so easy to simply upload the information he was carrying. It would be equally easy for any number of rival factions to intercept, decode, and quickly act on that information. He thumbed the accelerator and made for the dome.
A United Mars, he thought as he cruised across the rough terrain. That had been the dream. A global republic? A confederation of domed city-states? A true and literal democracy? It was strange how the past’s vision of the future seemed so unforgivably naive. As the sun descended deeper into the horizon, Orton noticed tiny flashes in the distance. In the thin Martian air, nearly microscopic machines were surveilling and, when opportunity presented itself, attacking. All the major factions had fleets of these innumerable, artificially intelligent drones. The flashes were drones being destroyed by a rival’s countermeasures. This microscopic, airborne war raged round the clock, as the tiny, flying robots fought, were destroyed, and were replaced minutes later by new models with revisions and upgrades based on their predecessors’ failure. It was this front in the vast, internecine conflict and not the engagements of men and their bulky vehicles and weapons, some argued, that would determine the outcome of the war.
Arriving at last, Orton piloted the motorcycle into the dome’s narrow airlock and breathed a sigh of relief. In ten minutes time, the data he carried would be scrutinized by military intelligence. Would it make any difference? Time would tell. The interior door of the airlock opened with a click. Orton stepped through. The atmosphere was only marginally different from that outside the dome. He took off his respirator and inhaled tenuous air into lungs engineered to extract oxygen directly from carbon dioxide. He withdrew the translucent, nictitating membrane from his eyes and hurried to deliver his report.
by submission | Apr 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Drew Dunlap
My phone would vibrate approximately every fifteen to twenty minutes.
“Hey bro, there’s a celestial event going on,” said a friend. “Can you see it from your place?” asked another. “Heaven’s Veil is tonight!!!!!!!” buzzed a text. You get the picture.
Even my mother called. She asked me the normal round of questions, and scolded me for not calling her. Usual stuff. But then she started into the news report from last night that mentioned the stars aligning. I rolled my eyes, but didn’t let it carry through my voice. I feigned interest and, after promising to meet her for breakfast in two days, hung up the phone.
Dotty walked into the room, sat on the floor and stared up at me.
“Not you, too,” I pleaded.
“No, she doesn’t care about the alignment, but I think it’s kind of cool.” The voice came from the doorway behind Dotty. Karen swung Dotty’s leash casually as she leaned against the frame. “Besides, she could do for a walk, and so could you.”
I raised my hands in surrender.
“Fine, fine. Dotty wins. I have been beaten into submission. I will go out with all the amateur astronomers, ancient astrologers and asinine alien academes. But I refuse to gawk at a bunch of dots in the sky.”
I smiled mischievously, but Karen knew I was mostly serious. As a child I read a lot of Poe, which led me to a lot of Lovecraft. H.P. struck a chord with me, one that reverberated through my entire philosophical and religious existence.
The more we ventured among the stars, the more we inhabited other planets and moons, the farther our reach extended – the more obvious it became to me how terribly insignificant we are. Space stations and taxi shuttles did not make the human race any more profound. We were nothing but a virus to the natural universe.
I sound like a real pisser, but really I am not. I have a good job, a lovely wife, great friends and a sweet dog. I enjoy every morning that I wake up and I smile at night as I close my eyes for sleep. Being a cynic does not mean I have to be an asshole.
I smile and pat Dotty’s head before putting on her collar.
“Just don’t believe the zealots predicting the end of the world today, sweety.”
We made our way up the winding trail behind our house. This path was not only quiet, far away from the hover-tunnels and mass transit shuttles, but at the top of the rise we should be able to avoid most of the lights from below. I knew Karen wanted to see the planetary alignment. The things you do for love.
“It really is very pretty,” she finally said as we reached the top. Despite my previous bravado, I looked up. I had to admit she was right.
“It has a kind of greenish glow to the whole thing,” I observed. “I didn’t really expect …”
The words froze in my mouth as I noted a swirling pattern to the glow around the planets and the moon. The ground shook briefly as I noticed the patterns draw closer to the Earth. I tried to speak again, but all of the air had left my lungs. Dotty squealed and exploded at my feet, a red lump on a leash. I refused to look at Karen for I could not bear my last memory to be like that of Dotty.
My theory about mankind’s insignificance came to fruition. At least I felt no pain.
by submission | Apr 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Dr. José Zhang gently rotated an 800 credit bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice. The price of champagne had skyrocketed in the last several weeks in anticipation of the completion of Project Hermes. Zhang’s colleague, Dr. Ian Bartlett, looked at the champagne with a skeptical eye. “You know there’s a good chance this isn’t going to work, José? I mean, there was no practical way to do any real field test. Nothing works right the first time, you know?”
Zhang smiled and said, “‘Your royal Highness, members of the Academy, esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is with great honor I accept the Nobel Prize in Physics for the first successful space fold drive engine test in history. But with all due humility I must point out that without the constant naysaying and discouragement of my fellow scientist here, this project would have been completed a lot sooner.’ What do you think?”
Bartlett tried to suppress a smile and failed. He inspected the champagne. “Alright, if this works, we celebrate. If it fails, we drown our sorrows. We’re covered either way.”
Bartlett took a seat beside Zhang in the mission control room and watched the two countdowns on the screen. The first countdown indicated the time for activation of the space fold drive. The number was already T-plus seven minutes. The drive had already turned on seven minutes ago. The second countdown was at T-minus sixty seconds. The latter countdown denoted the time for telemetry to reach mission control from the ship which was eight light-minutes from Earth.
The Hermes ship’s space fold engine had two major components. One half of the engine, Hermes I, was in the ship in orbit around the Sun. The other half, Hermes II, was 26 trillion miles away in orbit around Alpha Centauri B. It had taken most of 100 years for the robotic vessel containing half the drive to traverse over four light-years using a conventional ion drive propulsion system. Once there, it sent back a laser pulse confirming it had arrived and was intact. Traveling at the speed of light, the signal took just over four years to reach Earth. A command signal was then sent back to the probe in response instructing it to activate its half of the engine at a certain date and time, specifically, today at precisely 1600 hours Coordinated Universal Time.
The plan was for both components of the space fold engine to activate at the exact same moment. If the theory was correct, as long as the vessels were at least 3.827 light-years apart, at the precise instant of simultaneous activation, a fold in the fabric of space would occur for exactly one Planck time unit, roughly 10 to the negative 43 seconds. In that infinitesimal span of time, the two vessels would swap places.
Zhang picked up the champagne bottle, removed the foil from the cork, and started untwisting the restraint wire. He wanted to pop the cork just after the space fold maneuver took place.
“Ten…nine…eight…,” the mission control crowd chanted in unison. Zhang looked at Bartlett, the latter’s brow furrowed with worry. “Pessimist,” Zhang said with a smile as he worked on the champagne bottle’s cork.
“Zero!”
Mission control was suddenly filled with screams not of joy but of horror. The space fold had worked. The Hermes II ship was now in Earth’s solar system, as was Alpha Centauri B! The new orange-yellow sun looked like an angry cyclopean eye. Zhang’s hands started to tremble uncontrollably. The cork popped.
