by submission | Mar 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Daly
There were two, quite different, options open to him now.
The optical sensor domes sprouting from his aft projections registered six thermal spikes; a quick cross reference from his synthetic aperture radar strips confirmed the incoming ships. Pulling a polite one gee acceleration towards him, they were slipping into a rough hemisphere about three kilometres apart. It was a subtle combat stance, if you counted subtle as not actively broadcasting your intent to surround and confine the target. Of course, that broadcast came over within minutes, gently tickling his microwave sensors: the ship captains urging him to deactivate.
He looked slowly out over the empty starscape ahead, his gravity field reshaping to align him towards a polar orbit of the vast B-class star stretching below his bulk. The blue radiance below was blinding his ventral sensors, especially in the incredibly bright UV region. He knew that his pursuers would have difficulty seeing detail, only a faint smudge due to his stellar occultation at half a light second distance. His transversal velocity was steady at nearly two kilometres per second, forcing the hunters to aim ahead to the intercept point; at their current range missiles would not have enough fuel and acceleration to hit him. He began small, random adjustments to his acceleration, negating any projectile targeting completely. Time was now the limiting commodity.
He retreated to the faster optical substructure within his core, buying him additional thinking time, and began weighing up his options.
The first was the most obvious, easiest to perform and physically safest choice: Surrender. He had no online weapon systems, so fighting was contraindicated. Of course after surrender the pursuers would not destroy his body; it was far too valuable as a technological entity. However, his personality would probably be etched away or modified, which was the worst outcome. Fear of death, it seemed, was not limited to biologicals.
The second was riskier and much more difficult: Running. His body was much stronger, faster and more agile than any two of the other ships combined, but there was one major physical limit. The vacuum he swam through was permeated by the mass shadow of the brilliant star below him, allowing him to anchor, push off and resist against the gravity field. The further away he ran, the less capable he would be – deep space was not an option.
Anger and frustration reached their apex and he sprang out of the isolated optical core, screaming into every available spectrum. Signalling lasers flickered into the darkness; microwaves tore out and superheated every polar molecule in a kilometre radius; his magnetic shielding expanded, producing bright aurorae as it focussed stellar charged particles. Finally he kicked out against the gravitational ether and felt massless as a great ripple raced out, like a tidal wave in space-time.
Two minutes later, his rage subsided. His sensors reopened and sampled the thermally hot sphere he now sat in. As it slowly radiated and cooled back to background levels, he observed hundreds of small objects slavishly following a dead trajectory where his pursuers once flew, on course to add their mass to the great star below him.
He lay in the vacuum, retreated to his quiet substrate, and slowly contemplated the third path.
by submission | Mar 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kyle Hubbard
Humans are remarkably ugly.
The kylhu child had never seen a real one before, so it stared with morbid fascination at the man on the stage. The human marched back and forth on two legs, bellowing and waving his bizarre limbs in grand, sweeping gestures. He was speaking a local kylhu dialect, but not very well; he did not meet the right vocal pitches, he paused frequently to suck in air, and his body language was all wrong.
“Come see aliens from all over galaxy!” he was shouting. The surrounding kylhu seemed confused and a little afraid as the human made his speech. The kylhu race rarely saw anything from off-world, as most space travelers felt that Kylh’on had little to offer them. It was a dry, desolate planet with harsh weather that spanned most of the solar rotation. The carnival had arrived on an optimal cycle, but it was unclear what they hoped to trade for the entertainment they provided.
The child began to wander the fair, marveling at the sights. Various alien life forms were on display inside metal cages, glass tanks, and fenced pens. As much as the child wanted to take its time looking at them, the carnival would be leaving soon, so it had to be quick if it was going to see them all.
Scurrying from display to display, the child stumbled blindly into the leg of a large creature. It looked up and up until it recognized the alien as the human it saw earlier.
“Greetings, young one,” the man said in the same barely-coherent kylhu dialect he used before. “You like fair?”
Nervous, the child said nothing.
“You like candy?” the human continued, though the final word was unfamiliar. He reached down and presented a pink, fluffy substance. “Cotton candy,” said the human in a language the child did not understand. “Human food. Try.”
Curious, the child took a small piece of the fluff and tasted it. The flavor was very strong, which the child disliked at first, yet it found itself ingesting a little more. Before long it was eagerly consuming the stuff, unable to stop itself. The child felt ill, yet it kept eating and eating until the pink fluff lost its color, and the world faded to black.
–
“You awake yet?”
It took the child a few moments to recognize the noises as words, but it could not decipher what they meant. Its vision returned slowly, and it let out a sickly gurgle, feeling queasy and disoriented.
“‘Bout time,” said the voice. The kylhu child peered around its surroundings and found itself trapped inside a metal cage. Everything nearby was grey and shiny, unlike the familiar orange sands of Kylh’on.
A figure approached the cage, causing the child to back into a corner. It recognized the figure at once: the human from the carnival.
“Have a nice nap, kiddo?” said the man, but the child did not understand him. The human crouched down and tapped lightly on a metal bar. “Sorry about this,” he said. “Your kind don’t have much in the way of currency. None we can use in the colonies, anyhow. But you… You’re something special. The colonies are just itching for a new display, and I think you’re it. You’re gonna put us on the map again, little guy.”
The young kylhu shrunk even further into the corner, its little body quivering. It wanted to go back home. It didn’t like this place.
The human exhaled and rose to his full height. “Buck up there, champ,” he said. “You’re in show business, now.”
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Judge yawned as he seated himself at the bench. “What are we doing here, Mike?” he asked the bailiff.
“Your Honor, we are hearing the civil case of ‘Captain Taylor versus Solar System Transportation, Inc.’, a dispute over wages due for a cargo run from Earth Station Tango to Alpha Centauri base.”
“Fine,” replied the Judge as he turned to address the plaintiff. “What’s your claim, son?”
“Your Honor, I left Earth in 2248. It was SST’s first interstellar commercial payload, and because of the hardships, they agreed to pay me a bonus of 100,000 credits per year. I returned eleven years later, in 2259. Therefore, they owe me an extra 1,100,000 credits.”
“Sounds straightforward,” noted the Judge. “So,” he continued as he addressed the defendant, “why haven’t you paid the man?”
“Simple relativity, Your Honor. Due to time dilation during the 0.95c portion of the trip, Captain Taylor only aged three years. Therefore, we are only obligated to pay him an extra 300,000 credits.”
Damn, thought the Judge to himself, time dilation makes my head ache. Why can’t these lawyers foresee these types of issues and make provisions up front. All this ambiguity was begging for litigation. “Okay,” he lamented, “let me see the contract. Court is adjourned until this time tomorrow.”
The following day, the Judge resumed his position at the bench. Without preamble, he announced, “I find for the plaintiff. However, the award will not be 1.1 million credits. It seems that in section 102, paragraph 22, the contract stipulated the adherence to the Space Transportation Act of 2203. Apparently, it’s one of the older Acts written to protect non-union pilots from disreputable transportation companies. It states that pilots must be compensated 60 credits per shift hour, or 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, whichever is higher. Therefore, at the hourly rate, the six month, or 1244 shift hours, round trip to Titan would pay 74,640 credits. On the other hand, based on the distance traveled rate, the 1.486 billion miles round trip would pay only 37,480 credits. For decades, the hourly rate was the only one that mattered, since the spaceships of the era traveled so slowly. However, when star ships were developed, no one at SST thought about updating the terms of their standard contract.” The Judge grinned as he looked the CEO of Solar System Transportation, Inc. and his panel of high paid attorneys. “You see where this is going, I suppose?”
The CEO became pale and his eyes rolled upward as he fainted, toppling over his chair.
“Ah, I see you do,” remarked the Judge with a smile. “At the rate of 0.2 credits per Earth diameter traveled, I rule for the plaintiff the sum of 1.32 billion credits for the 52.5 trillion mile round trip to Alpha Centauri. ”
by Julian Miles | Mar 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“The view from here is mighty fine, it sends a shiver up my spine.”
I laugh at Kara’s ditty as it arrives. Nothing but the truth, even out here. My suit keeps me spread-eagled on the side of cannon four as it thunders along with its seven brothers, sending the Espiritu de Sanctii further from the remains of my home.
“How’s things, big guy?”
“Sweet as, babe. Just hanging around waiting for the boys. Good view, rockin’ rhythm, best seat in the house.”
Canopus fades from view in the drive-flare as I finish my sentence. I had been top ganger at Wenceslas Station, the only man for the tricky job of checking the fuel couplings on the Vatican flagship. It had all been going well until a distress call from a convoy activated the ‘expedite rescue’ sequence. Not one of the holy orders had thought to obey the procedures for hard-lock maintenance, so the ship had obeyed the clarion call and lit out to the rescue at emergency speed while the crew got their asses in gear.
Wenceslas Station had taken a level two decompression when the ship tore loose. They were just scrambling to contain that major atmosphere breach when the station took the brunt of a full-bore eight cannon overburn. I watched in numb horror as eight thousand people died in a chain detonation that scattered fiery pearls across Canopian space. The ship did not deviate from its path.
I had just finished checking cannon four when the burn started. The violent lurch activated my failsafe magnetics, which combined with the fact that I was standing at ninety degrees to the thrust vector meant I slammed down onto the hull over drive number four that had been beneath my feet. My safety array became a prison. While we continued to move and the station beacon was not found, the array kept me stuck like a barnacle to a keel. Kara is forward and half a rotation separated from me. She had been in the tube between airlocks when it happened. Her magnetics had plastered her face down mere metres from the ship’s airlock.
“Dave, what are we going to do about this?”
“Tell your suit to seek supplementary power to maintain emergency state. It should probe and find an external maintenance panel to get you juice and goop.”
“Done that. What next?”
“Tell your suit to ready emergency hibernation measures with realspace restart.”
“Actioned. Why?”
“Because at some point this bastard is going to dive.”
Dive being slang for entering drivespace. Consciousness cannot not tolerate that without experiencing sanity’s equivalent of a blancmange being hit by a sledgehammer. Driveships have suppressor fields to stop crew meltdown. Those fields are for internal passengers only.
“Oh crap.”
“Not a problem. We get to doze for a bit and wake up somewhere new.”
“Sure?”
“Promise. Plus we get to be famous.”
“Why would we – ”
Reality tore into spinning curtains of impossible colours and my suit reacted just fast enough. The lights went out.
*
“Dave!”
My mouth tasted like the green greeblie from the back of beyond had done something unspeakable in it. The lights were too bright and I had a pounding headache.
“Quietly, woman.”
Kara whispered: “Why would we be famous?”
I looked about the medical suite. There were several people in Canopian Ranger uniforms standing around with witness recorders. I grinned at Kara.
“Because no-one has ever survived doing something that insanely stupid.”
She hit me hard and low. Apparently she only kissed me after I had passed out, the rotten cow.
by submission | Mar 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : A. Zachary Spery
I was looking good when I wheeled into Chaucer’s, the hottest singles bar in lower downtown. I just had my corpus bridge upgraded to a new Mitsushimi DX900q and installed prominently on the side of my Neodynamics’ engramatic coprocessor case. My high efficiency General Electronics’ sonofusion power cell glowed a brilliant green through the walls of the polyurethanic cylinder housing in my abdomen and my polished aluminum frame was gleaming. My drive wheels were new Goodyear’s.
I rolled across the room to an empty space at the bar and ordered my usual gin and tonic. The bar tender handed it to one of my end-effectors. I swung around and leaned back on the elbow of my quaternary manipulator to casually survey the room.
That’s when she rolled in. She had a classy rig with the kind of right angles that would drive the Robopope to sin. It was elegant, with just enough acrylic-plexi to see there was high dollar hardware inside, but not so much that you could tell the bus speed of her hypothalamic multiplexor. She wheeled up beside me and ordered a girly drink–something with an umbrella. The other men in the bar were disassembling her with their optical sensors.
I craned my neck over and said, “Girl, you’ve increased my coolant flow by orders of magnitude.”
She pointed one of her optics at me briefly and removed a cigarette from her purse. “It looks like you can handle it.” Then she smiled and said, “Nice cooling system.”
My CPU voltage capped and the chrome on my heat sinks blued.
She continued, “But I don’t think you could handle me. You’re not my style.” She swiveled her optical instrument array away. “Too much show, too little go.”
I gestured to the transparent cover over my DSX-771 motherboard cluster with onboard cognitive accelerators. “Girl, I am all go. I am the Italian sports car of go. It takes me mere seconds to calculate pi out to a billion decimal places.”
She smiled again. “No, not that kind of go–”
Just then a large industrial unit lumbered up and put a hulking mechanical arm on the bar between her and me. He had a flat grey coat of paint over a steel art deco exoskeleton that made him look like a soviet era locomotive. Gears spun and clunked within him, heat waves emanated from a vent on his head, and I think my state of the art Trasco olfactory sensors detected a hint of burned oil.
“Is this jerk bothering you?” asked the locomotive while glaring at me.
“I think he was just keeping your spot cool until you arrived, baby.” she said. “Weren’t you, Fonzy?”
“Thanks.” said the locomotive as he pushed me over to the adjacent spot–stripping the gears in my drivetrain. “I owe you one.”
I left. Maybe I’ll try Duffy’s.
