by submission | Sep 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : Damien Krsteski
Just as I made my way next to an older lady on the pew, the general climbed on the stage. All the commotion died down, everyone’s ears eager to hear him speak. After some quieting down, he began, his tone as morose as the weather outside.
“My fellow citizens, in these dire times, know that your leaders are still among you.” Loud cheering greeted the introduction to what I knew would be a well-prepared speech.
“We have endured thus far and rest assured, victory will be ours.” More cheering ensued, to the point where I felt the urge to cup my ears. But I couldn’t, so I joined in, and clapped loudly myself. I found it rather amusing, if not somewhat pathetic.
“It has been seven years since the war began and although we have suffered great loss our spirits haven’t withered the least bit. We’ll rid ourselves of the abomination from the sky,” He pointed upwards and some people including the lady beside me gasped audibly.
Abomination from the sky? Really?
“Those creatures landed on our soil, on our very Earth, drinking our water, polluting our air.”
At around this time I must have dozed off since I can’t recall anything more. I sat there, breathing the stale air of the church, measuring the pauses between each cacophonous cheering of the edgy crowd. The woman seated beside me must have noticed how distracted I was and leaned towards me.
“I lost my oldest sun in the war,” she whispered, the general’s voice echoing all around us. “At the battle of Midland. His captain said he died as a true hero, bringing down a dozen of those slimy scum with him as he went.” She produced a silver medal from her coat pocket. “Two generals drove up to our house to personally hand me this.”
I took it from her hand, trying to feel up the metal but all that skin rendered the attempt futile. I will never get used to those sacs. I handed it back to her, nodded and offered my condolences.
Around that time the general was finishing up with the speech, calling for more endurance, more faith in their country. The time had come. People all over the church stood up, raising their fists in approval. I gave one last look at the crowd, trying to memorize as many faces as I could and savor the moment. With one click of a button the whole scene vanished.
I woke many miles away, rid of human skin but with a horrible migraine. Wrapping one tentacle around my neck, I massaged the spot up and down.
A small inconvenience for a job well done. Get some rest then get on with the next one. Although before I do so, I think thirty-seven skin-sacs deserves a silver medal too. I must remember to mention it to the suits, I’m positive it’ll look great on me.
by submission | Sep 29, 2011 | Story |
Author : Cal Glover-Wessel
I guess I thought there would be more turmoil, more mounting panic, but when you know the date and time of the end I guess it’s easier to accept it. There were no riots; there were no religious upheavals. It was as if the whole world had skipped every stage of grief and was ready to ride this one out. I tried to explain everything to my son, Harlan. He was petrified, of course. He didn’t really understand. He had always relied on me to fix the problems and have all the answers, but here was something so big that even I couldn’t fix it. He saw right through my calm facade. If I was terrified in his eyes, what hope did he have? I’d forbidden him to watch TV as to avoid the hype and the pretense, so he would spend all of his time watching the sky. There were times I needed to shut his blinds so he’d stop watching the stars and go to bed, but sometimes I would watch with him.
I had a dream the night the world ended. I was driving through the desert in my first car from high school, a dark blue clunker of a Buick. The clouds were heavy and thunder rumbled all around me, but there was no rain. Massive gray birds flew overhead, sharply pointed wings cutting the heavy clouds; fat red crests sitting over solemn hooked beaks. They flew towards and perched upon an iron tower far ahead of me, and as I sped towards them they began to scream. Their shrieks grew louder and more frequent as I drove closer to the tower, and soon the screams pierced even the thunder. I drove ever faster and as the monstrous birds screamed the clouds parted above their heads and a blinding beautiful light shone through. As I drew closer the bird’s shrieking squawks become more mechanical and more monotone until they had blended entirely with my alarm and I awoke, my body still tired but my thoughts clear.
It’s dark now in my room, but out the window I can still see the stars. I walk into Harlan’s room and gently shake him awake. We step outside onto our walkway. There are no streetlights in our neighborhood, but I can see the lights from neighbors’ houses. Some of them have stepped outside like us, while others wait indoors. Our own stoop light shines behind Harlan and me, casting our shadows on the lawn. I watch his tiny shadow reach out and clutch at my shadow, and I feel his arms around my leg. I pick him up and hold him as we look at the sky and wait.
First the lights go out.
And then the stars.
by featured writer | Sep 28, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Featured Writer
Gravity sucks. I mean, who wants to be stuck to anything because it’s so big you can’t get away from it?
I was born in the same cubby that Mom and Dad raised fourteen of us before the aches got ‘em. “Drive stress”, the officers call it. Seems like that gravity thing is plain mean. After all, they did their best to “replenish population” and their only reward is being deadified by the ship? Seemed unfair.
There I was, working my way up the ladder in the tech section. Didn’t plan it this way, but after we’d left the fortieth planet we could have settled on, seemed to me like some officers liked things just as they were a little too much. Told us about “adverse cultural impact” and “negative bacterium adjustment” and stuff like that. I had an idea and then found out I wasn’t the only one.
So when the officers culled all the people who had “formed quasi-religious ideals counter to mission parameters” I knew we were on to something.
So I’m hanging upside down trying to keep my gear from tumbling on to the deck a long way down. I’m skinsuited so I don’t drip, which is going to wrinkle me like a prune so I’ll have to hide from the officers tomorrow. Been here for two hours and my head is pounding and my eyes keep blurring, seems like gravity knows I’m here to mess with it and is trying to make my head explode.
With a smile I complete the reroute and flick the switch I’ve just hooked into the “gravitic core stabiliser coupling”. Only box I could find that related to gravity, so this must be the one. Techs only do some stuff and “mission critical systems” are fixed by the officers. So I spent days looking for a gravity bit. Worked back from the “drive attenuator” box I found behind a bulkhead. Took six weeks but I got it. Gonna teach this gravity thing who’s boss, gonna see the officers spit when me an’ mine from below level ten can turn their ship on an’ off unless they do as we say.
Mom, Dad; this is for you. I flick the switch back and forth a few times.
It gets real noisy down there and officers is runnin’ all over the place, shouting and yelling in their fancy lingo. Then a real bright light hits me. One of them officers seems to have got a line on what I done. I hears a real posh voice from behind the light,
“It’s a squaddie, skipper. Up in the routing duct, he’s done something to the connections, can’t see what.”
“Tell that distant spawn of a redneck émigré that unless he undoes what he’s done, we’re buggered.”
I got the drift of that alright. So I wiggle the switch a few more times. They all get frantic down there and suddenly I don’t feel so good and I hear a ladies’ voice below, all squeaky-like;
“He’s stuttering the coupling! Can’t you feel the fluctuations? If he keeps doing that we’re going to be a toroid denser than a collapsar!”
“Shoot him. Now!”
I heard that. I shouts down to them.
“Don’t you be thinkin’ about that, officers! I knows you got a plot to keep us down an’ if you don’t ‘fess up, I’m just gonna keep wigglin’ this here switch.”
So I wiggles the switch some more to show I wasn’t messin’.
Then gravity roars at me as it presses down real hard.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Sep 27, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Packed into the ship’s tight squad bay were twenty five lockers and twenty five cryo-beds. Inside their frozen coffins rested men and women engineered for their speed, agility and overall physical prowess. Perfection incarnate. These individuals represented the finest combatants culled from the Army Rangers, Marine Force Recon and Navy S.E.A.L.s. The Air Force had lobbied unsuccessfully to have their Glee Club included.
Woken from their frozen slumber, the men stared unseeing from their open beds. Communication bugs crawled from their housings and burrowed into the neural jacks of each soldier. Twenty five bodies jerked spasmodically. They quickly quieted as realization of place settled over them.
Lieutenant Bova’s voice was the first heard. “Drop your cocks and grab your socks people. SUIT UP!”
“What about those of us fortunate enough not to have cocks,” Chief Petty Officer Rand cooed.
“SHUT UP,” he snapped at the buxom red head. He rode her hard in front of the others, but they knew that in actuality, in-body, he was riding her hard. Out-body though, he repulsed her.
Without another word, the troopers suited up in plasteele augmentation armour. While adjusting and flexing the form fitting reactive armour, they felt more than heard the change in pitch of the drop ship’s engines as they bit atmosphere.
“I hate enefs,” somebody muttered. Enefs, Nasty Fuckers. Two metres of six limbed insect-like humanoid. Primitive, but tough to kill.
“Nobody asked you to like ’em, just kill ’em,” Bova grinned, “besides, just think of all the overtime you’ll get.” As one, they groaned at the worn joke.
“Hey Rand, how about a kiss for luck,” Sergeant Valek sung out.
“In your dreams,” she replied, playfully punching him in the face, bloodying his nose.
“Knock it off. Be profess…” Lt. Bovas words were cut short as a massive explosion rocked the drop ship sending the soldiers sprawling across the bay.
“What the fuck? Enefs don’t have weapons that can penetrate a T-field.” Cpl. Bernes comments were cut short as a plasma blast penetrated the deck, vapourizing CPO Rand.
“They don’t. They didn’t… they…,” Lt. Bovas words trailed off. “It’s a trap.” he said, the stunned disbelief visible on his face. A well placed shot struck the tiny ship’s reactor. They died instantly.
Deep within the aircraft carrier Robert E. Lee, safe in geosynch above the planet, twenty five figures lay in boost couches, waldo strips firmly attached to their shaven pates. Lt. Bova was the first to awaken. With great effort, he manoeuvred his corpulent form over the edge of the couch and stood on incongruously scrawny legs.
Next to stir was a skinny red head. Not one to give in to the vanity of surgery, not that it would have improved matters, she reached up and retrieved a pair of thick framed black plastic glasses and settled them on a blackhead encrusted nose. “Shit,” was all she said.
“What the hell was that,” a hook nosed, chinless Cpl. Bernes of the CSMC squeaked in a trilling falsetto that would make even the most butch choirmaster swoon, “we’re the best of the best. We’re Delta damnit.”
Lt. Bova, Army Ranger, shrugged his shoulders, his massive man boobs jiggling gently. “You win some, you lose some. Hey Rand, care to join me in a donut?”
“Screw you fatty,” said former S.E.A.L. team six member, CPO Rand.
The twenty five members of the elite Delta Force, the best of the best of the best, with honours, slowly shuffled out of the combat centre for their feeding and a well earned nap.
by submission | Sep 26, 2011 | Story |
Author : Dave Rudden
It screamed as the last of the connectors plunged in.
A proper scream, a gut-scream, lifting it off the surgical table in an arched back gasp-shudder orgasm of pain and raw hate that made every hair on my exposed arm shiver with sweet appreciation. The med-arms retracted, drizzling blood from hair-blade edge and tweezer barb.
The thing on the table exhaled in a servo-whine. Its ceramic eyelids fluttered.
I had found her in the Big Nothing, a petty thief fuelling a click habit by turning over liquor stores and the occasional food depot. My God, she had been beautiful. A curved blade of a girl with dark eyes and the rainbow slick of a chem-tat on her cheek, barely five foot of muscle and slick leather. It had taken two blocks to run her down. I could have stunned her, used the up-scale neural amp that had taken me six months to acquire on the black market, but part of me had wanted to watch her run.
The first test.
She had moved like liquid silver, darting from shadow to neon-furred shadow, looping through the nonsense-pattern of streets, scaling fire escapes and metro-cables. She took down a cambot with a thrown knife, doubled back to crush another with a purloined length of rebar. I doubt she even asked herself who her pursuers were. She just ran. That pureness, that simple, animal lust for freedom…
Beautiful.
In the end, she had turned to fight, pulling a gapper pistol on the cowled figures that had matched her step for step across half the streets of the Big Nothing. That impressed me. Far beyond the obvious physical parameters, a certain… fortitude was required. A need to fight. A hateful, scraping, primal need to survive, no matter the odds.
She had shot two before they had taken her screaming into the dark.
It had not been easy, getting this far. She had flatlined twice during the procedures, and but for her common blood type I would have had to dismiss her as a usable subject at all. Her implants would most likely be rejected, if they interfaced at all. The thing on the table let out another hissing breath, and struggled to rise on limbs of slick ceramic and steel, the joints purring as they fought to respond. It would be days before the neural links moved as smoothly as un-augmented flesh.
Her voice, when it came, was a trembling warble of static.
“What am I?”
A capital crime, I thought. An experiment with weeks to live. But a death I will learn from, and the next girl, the next thief or click-addict or whore, will live just that little bit longer. And then all of you will be remembered, in that first prototype, that first shaking step.
My voice cracked as I replied.
“You are the future.”
