by Julian Miles | Oct 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The terrain is ideal for them, and they will take every advantage of the variegated cover: tiered platforms that scatter this little roomscape. Plus they have the advantage of looking like the indigenes. It is a good thing that I was tasked to interdict this zone. No other unit could handle this without resorting to terrain-ruining ordnance.
From the lampshade I spot movement. This gives the assembly nearest the target a bearing. No movement yet. Nothing to betray my presence. I have a potential target. Now for the thing I share with every soldier throughout history – the wait for the battle to commence.
My deployment of an overlook assembly is a strategic advantage that few of our kind have mastered. They cannot yet understand; I cannot understand why they do not. I can see the whole zone. Three distributed layers allow me to go from initial spotting to tactical view without movement. Nothing to warn hyperaware opponents.
The concept of dynamic assemblies is also foreign to my kind. Restructuring myself according to the dictates of terrain, opponent and opportunity. It is simple for me. I presume that is why I am moved so often, being assign to zones where my unique skillset bestows an insurmountable advantage.
The movement resolves itself into a scatter of arachnid hatchlings. I focus down to individual units, devolving the assembly that holds the contact zone into pairs assigned to each hatchling. Not long now.
Far to the left rear flank, an atypical movement: A hatchling flicks its rearmost right leg up and over to scratch behind its rightmost eye. That is not an arachnid move. It is a telltale of a covert drone. In a synaesthesic conflict, operators of drones that have more than two visual inputs experience a phantom ear-itch. So far it is incurable, cannot be trained out, and the movement to ‘scratch’ it is unconscious.
I flag that false arachnid and resume my waiting. There is never only one drone. They are suspicious and fear my kind, so they come in numbers. Within three minutes, I have acquired seven further targets.
A surprise sighting on the coving: eight arachnids moving in a single column along the ridges made by the decorative scrollwork. I am impressed. Apart from the giveaway formation, using the ceiling is something they had been remiss in adopting. It seems that their technology has finally proven artificial gecko traction pads, something I have had since awakening.
Another minute to confirm that every other moving thing in this zone is natural, then I assign kill flights to the portions of assemblies behind each target. With a flex of my will, the hammer falls: inanimate fixtures spread sixty-four pairs of wings and stoop down upon them where they struggle. The nanopolymer sprayed from the miniscule tangle rounds shot by tiny underarm grenade launchers, using the slack space in the forearm exoskeleton. The muzzles are still emitting ephemeral wisps of smoke as they swing up to support the claws in the classic poise.
This lounge is mine. I am Mantid Swarm 35, and I will be the standard for the next generation of my kind. Over a thousand bodies allow me to include specialisations such as grenade-launching and functional wings without degrading my tactical effectiveness. From formicid drones to human troops, I have never met a problem that I could not kill.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Time. I joked once with her that it was simply the thing that stopped everything from happening at once. When she asked me for space I laughed, and said “Of course you can have space, if you didn’t, everything would be happening right here.”
That’s not what she meant. She wasn’t amused.
There’s that long awkward period of mourning you go through when you stop being part of someone’s life, when they stop being part of yours. You do things to help you cope, maybe workout too much, run too far, move to a different city and start drinking all the time. Coping mechanisms. I tried them all, and in the end, I dried up, slowed down and poured myself back into my work. It’s ironic that the thing that killed us wound up being the thing I turned to in order to save myself.
My liver has always been shit.
She never believed me when I told her what I wanted to build, and when I tried to explain it she’d wave her hands and talk over me “Too much science, tell your nerd friends, I don’t care”, and then she’d go watch the gardening channel or the food network or something.
It also seems a little ironic that on the night, in fact in the moment I actually made it work, she pulled out to pass and kissed a semi in the dark. She was my first call, she never picked up. Peterbilt would be her last kiss. I’m still kind of jealous.
So what does this have to do with anything, you ask? Everything, actually.
That thing I made work, notice I didn’t say ‘perfected’, we’ll come back to that. The thing I made work with all my nerd-science was a means to take a specific moment in time and space, focus it and revert it to an earlier instance of that point. Kind of reverting to a space-time save-point in real life, like you would in a video game, but without having to have thought to save first.
The equipment is setup in my van just a few weeks from now, parked on the shoulder where the flowers are still piled up for a particular southern belle who’s going to have a mishap with a tractor trailer just a few moments further along this timeline.
That’s where it’s going to stay. Up the road she’s in her car, not quite fed up yet with how slow the car ahead of her is driving, and in the distance there’s a tractor trailer coming, its driver oblivious to how the night will never end for us.
I’m in the middle, stuck in a moment I can’t get out of. I expect I’ll stay forever, in this bubble of time just big enough for my mind to race.
Eventually I’m going to go completely insane.
In the end, the thing that killed us, and that saved me from self destructing has now ultimately enacted a fate much worse than death upon me.
Irony has always been shit too.
by submission | Sep 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
THE SENTINEL
They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.
EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.
by submission | Sep 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cole
“Watch out for that kid!”
Tanya swerves, kicking the drive gear into second. Our hover skimmer chugs left, close cropping a row of season’s end corn. She nudges the engine to a full stop and settles in the field.
Trash spills out of the can the kid was loading. He stands in his front yard, eyes wide, as the craft door opens and first I, then Tanya, emerge, removing our flight helmets. His camo pajamas are filthy, fraying at his ankles.
“Are you okay?!”
He continues to gape.
Tanya places her hand on my shoulder. “He ain’t bleeding, come on. We’ve got a deadline.”
Turning on his heel, he hits the porch at rocket speed, hollering, “Women from space!”
I run a hand through my long blonde hair and laugh.
*
“Y’all were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, Delia,” Squib snarls, his men unloading the cargo from the rear of the skimmer.
“We ran into a kid in a field”, I shrug.
“After you stopped at a bar?” Squib fishes a sequined bra out of the front floor board.
“Didn’t have a drop,” Tanya grins.
“A drop of liquor at least.”
Squib hands me the bra which I hold up to my flat chest, wiggling my hips until he cracks a smile.
“Worth it, then?”
“Hey, boss!”
The cargo foreman waves Squib over, a pleased look on his face.
“These’ll sell like hot toasties!”
*
“Like this,” Tanya says, showing the Anolian child how to blow bubbles through the ribbed pink plastic wand. The soap bubbles swirl through the purple air.
She laughs, her facial feelers scenting the air.
“Fizzy,” she squeaks.
Her parental polyp buys three bottles.
“I can’t believe they were such a good price,” I say, my skirt twirling as I dance through the slowly exploding incandescent spheres.
“They’re just not that popular Terra-side anymore.”
*
As I watch from the cover of trees, the hover skimmer hid, the kid in the camo pajamas picks up my gift.
“I thought aliens left better presents,” he comments idly, pulling out a yellow wand.
It hangs in his hand idly, a few bubbles dribbling through the lighter gravity. When he cracks a smile, I smile in return.
Some things are universal.
by submission | Sep 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
It’s rotating. It doesn’t look like it, but instruments show that it is. Right now it takes around 24 hours to complete one rotation. Since it’s just over two miles in diameter at its center, the amount of centrifugal “gravity” being generated right now is negligible. That’ll change. The drivers will keep slowly increasing the spin until it’s rotating once every two minutes. That will make the pseudo-gravity 0.45 g. It’ll take most of a year to get it spinning that fast. No matter. I’m in no hurry.
Even now, with the thing less than complete, it’s a work of art. Nearly ten miles long and perfectly rounded at both ends, it’s hard to believe it used to be three gigantic asteroids.
I make way stations. And while there’s an unfathomable amount of engineering that goes into them, anyone who says it isn’t art is a liar or a fool. You can’t totally rely on the equations to tell you what the proper land-to-water ratio should be. The hull specs that will block hard radiation while still greedily gathering up ordinary light to illuminate the interior? Your AI will get you pretty close, but there’s always a small gap between theory and practice. And it takes instinct to bridge that gap.
It’s surprising how many people think we’ve always used way stations in interstellar travel. We haven’t. During the first hundred and fifty years of extrasolar travel, various methods were attempted to get across the gulf between the stars. Suspended animation. Multi-generation ships. Near-light speed schemes. Not one explorer made it to his destination alive.
What can go wrong on a space mission within Earth’s solar system? A technical failure. Psychiatric issues. Medical emergencies. Radiation contamination of food or water or living space. Now extend that mission from tens of millions or a billion miles to one that has to cover multiple trillions of miles. The law of averages wins. Something going catastrophically wrong becomes all but certain.
The first way station halfway between Earth’s system and the Alpha Centauri system was small and fairly unimpressive by modern standards. The crew on the first attempt to reach Proxima Centauri after the station came online barely made it. They spent four months there effecting repairs to their ship and relaxing in an environment that at least approximated being outdoors on Earth. Now there are six stations equidistant between Sol and Proxima. It takes most of 10 years to make the trip, but you have a month or two every 18 months of the journey at one of the stations. You’re not trapped in the same spaceship for a decade. You’re never more than 18 months away from a giant O’Neill cylinder with forests and lakes and deserts.
Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani: They all have a string of way stations reaching back to Sol. And no two way stations are alike. You might explore a jungle on one station and participate in a snowball fight on the next one.
I’ve been working on this station for most of 20 years. A siliceous asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid, and a metallic asteroid. Bolt them together and fling them out of the asteroid belt and command nanotech machines like a conductor directing a symphony as you travel out between the stars. Twenty years and now the first way station between Sol and Procyon is almost ready. I’ve modeled the beach and sea on Destin, Florida. White sand and emerald water. And an artificial sun illuminated by concentrated starlight. You need that on an 88 trillion mile journey.
