by submission | Jun 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Pete Clark
In the vast, senseless void of space, a new star appeared.
Darin watched from the observatory with wide eyed wonder at the glowing orb, reflecting on the War, the unknown enemy. The unseen enemy. He trained his telescopes and tapped keys to optimise magnification. His hands shook, then steadied as he increased his adrenaline levels with a thought to a hormone implant at the base of his skull, inserted painlessly into his spinal cord. He maximised magnification and shut his nictitating eyelids, minimising glare.
It was innumerable miles away, this orb. Its light came in steady pulses, of every known wavelength and, Darin noted, searching the databases, some new. His excitement grew with each pulse, and as he watched, it moved subtly in his viewfinder. Impossible. He looked again, using a thought-controlled drone to connect more computer power. He gained another power of magnification and the orb filled the viewfinder, strange swirling clouds scudding across its surface. Instantly, Darin knew this was no star. He chilled.
He quickly patched into the communications network and tapped a message out on the keyboard that lit up on telescope’s base unit. Its soft glow illuminated his fingers, and turned the complex recognition circuitry embedded in their tips into a sparkle of fingerprint fireworks.
His message read, simply:
UNKNOWN STAR / CRAFT. CO-ORDINATES 1955:1565 b-SECTION. MOBILITY LOW ALTHOUGH MEASURABLE. SIZE INCALCULABLE. SUGGEST SENDING CRITICAL RESPONSE TEAMS 4 AND 6. WILL CONTINUE MONITORING AND REPORT AS NECESSARY.
He tapped the key that added his details. He paused before hitting send. He re-read his message and thought of the panic that might ensue. It was war time, sure enough, but to add to the confusion? He could be hailed for securing the nation and for doing so without causing panic or fear. He sent his message to one of the numerous storage files that he had secreted around the communications network, and gathered data.
The final pulse of energy that Darin registered was not light as known to him, but rather its inverse, invisible dark energy that reached Earth in a stream about as wide as a human hair. It punched through the focusing lens, taking microseconds to travel through the length of the telescope and out of the eye piece. Darin grunted in surprise as the energy pulse seared a path through his brain, cauterising a worming scar through his tissues. He fell from his chair, his final thought not of love or family, but only a nagging regret that he should have risked the panic of the nation and released his message from its secure folder after all.
Innumerable miles away, against the textured velvet backdrop of space, the orb winked out of existence, appearing seconds later, to those who cared to look, light years closer to Earth. Its surface boiled with energy, as if it was alive and the taste of death on its tongue had piqued its curiosity just enough for it to want to try again, perhaps on a larger scale.
by submission | Jun 28, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
I say goodnight to the two suns once they’re down. There’s a chill without ’em. I go to throw something warmer on. I end up putting on one of her old nightgowns; just throw it over what I’ve got on. I freshen up my drink and check on the charging situation. We don’t have a full charge, but we’re on our way.
Back outside I say goodnight to my HUV, her HUV, the HUV port… the mazeracks start crawling out of the little sheds I built them on the side of the HUV port and I say goodnight to each one of them. It’s morning to them, time to hunt. They give me little looks, they don’t get it. Whatever, they’ll be fine.
I make my way over to the little cemetery and say goodnight to everyone. I say goodnight to her last and longest. I tell her I know she’d understand and I cry, cry like a small child, wheezing and everything. Pretty quick my drink is empty. My cup may be defective. I promised myself to say goodnight to the whole bottle before… before I stop saying goodnight.
I say goodnight to everything that I recognize as an individual thing on my way back to the house. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight…
I put more drink in my drink. The charge is at 97%. I give it a little more time. I put on my favorite song. It isn’t our song, which is better. I can’t listen to it anymore. Damn, I like this song. It’s over; I check the charge and we’re all full. I go back and play our song and say goodnight to all the furniture I bump into walking over to my fully charged blastick.
The damage we did in our day… I haven’t fired it in years, but I kept it. Never know when something is going to come in handy. Our song is really pretty. I start dancing with my blastick, respectfully. We’re dancing slowly and tears are running down my face. I’m pretty sure my blastick is sad too, sad as an object can be. It can’t believe I’m asking it to do what it’s going to do. The song’s winding down and I’m rubbing the stick under my chin looking for a comfortable spot.
Then all hell wrecks into my yard. I run out and recognize Rig’s HUV like half crashed in my yard. I sling the stick over my shoulder and go see if he needs help.
That old boy falls out of the HUV a bloody mess, too bloody for that wreck. He looks up at me and laughs. He compliments my “ensemble” and dies. That’s a very Rig way to die. I say goodnight to him. Then I see six of the most desperate eyed kids that ever had eyes in his HUV. We stare back and forth. I don’t say goodnight to them. The oldest is a dirty haired girl, holds her head like she thinks she’s tough. She says Rig said I’d keep them safe if they got to me.
Two years I was planning tonight and they want me to change my mind in two minutes. Two more minutes and I tell everyone to get out of Rig’s HUV and load into mine over there. We have to get going. Maybe all them goodnights were right. Maybe I don’t make it back here. Maybe I can’t see letting nobody hurt some kids, lost as me and Rig and she was once.
by submission | Jun 26, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
“Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”
She felt the first bead of sweat follow the knap of her close cropped hair before running cool and smooth down her jaw and into her uniform collar. It was so quiet on the bridge; she swore that her exec had heard it.
“Twenty-five, twenty-four…”
Sixty people made less noise than a creeping cat as they watched the dizzying host of screens. Beyond the shutters, warp space sang to their dreams. No-one had slept much in the last eight months.
“Twenty-one, twenty…”
It had taken twenty years to reverse engineer Borsen warp technology, five more to work out navigation. Four years to build the first warp dreadnought. Even now, the Borsen still did things with warp that made grown scientists cry.
“Seventeen, sixteen…”
This was the crux. The first warp dreadnought, Excalibur, hurled like a vengeful spear at the Borsen homeworld, loaded with atmosphere igniters and stealth fighters for a genocide raid to finish the war that mankind was no longer confident of winning.
“Thirteen, twelve…”
Providing the bastardised warp technology brought them out at all, of course. Command had decided that since the Romala debacle, speed was of the essence. This test flight would also be the greatest raid at the furthest distance by the biggest warship ever built.
“Nine, eight…”
She thought of spring in Providence, her daughter playing on the swing while her husband made Irish coffee on the range. This was why they all fought. For all the families, ensuring their children had a world to grow up on and a future worth living.
“Five, four…”
A vibration ran through the two kilometres of the Excalibur, causing wide eyes and white knuckles for every one of the thousand plus crew. She prayed to a god hopefully nearby that they would see real space again.
“One. Phase transit.”
With a disconcerting lurch, the Excalibur arrived in the Borsen system. Sensors awakening galvanized people into frantic motion. They had to be on target in moments. She smiled a thin smile as the shutters withdrew. Time to see what colour your air is, you bastards.
“Oh god. Sir?”
At first, she just could not absorb it. The system had no planets. The reason was right there, waiting. It reflected the distant sunlight from its myriad surfaces, and she was sure that she could see the Excalibur reflected in one of the facets facing them. She gathered herself, years of training and bitter, bloody combat culminating in a defining command moment of grace under pressure;
“Exec. Shipwide, please.”
The general broadcast fanfare rang hollow.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived and I am sure you see what I do. No-one could have envisioned this. Please, stand down and make your peace with whatever gods you hold dear.”
She regarded it. So big. Could you call something the size of Jupiter a spaceship? The movement and weapons detectors homed in on the behemoth’s one acknowledgement of the Excalibur’s presence. The figures coming from the mass detector alone lit the board red with scale queries. Her second expressed the thoughts of all present with the rendingly appropriate line of defiance, prayer and dark humour;
“Sweet Lord, for what we are about to receive…”
She felt her face become calm as she watched a railgun the length of Texas send a projectile the size of Rhode Island at them. Her words ended the data stream that reached Earth eighteen years too late;
“Dear John, remember me. Raise Millie well. Love from Captain Mum.”
by submission | Jun 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Z. J. Woods
There seemed nothing wrong with the guy when he backed through the door. A little nervous, maybe. A little too long since he’d shaven. But otherwise? And for whom were such descriptions untrue?
Sloan produced glasses from a breast pocket and fingered them up the bridge of his nose. He put a fist over his mouth, cleared his throat. He said, “What can I do for you?”
The guy swung a denim sack up onto the counter. He untied it, reached in, produced books. Four books. Four hardcovers bound in honest-to-god cardboard and paper. Sloan pressed his glasses against his face, hard, for a moment. He watched as the guy arranged the books beside one another. Carefully.
The guy said, “I wanna — I need to, to sell these.”
“Well.” Sloan took up the rightmost, navy blue, thin, maybe two hundred pages, maybe less. He opened to the title page. It’d been torn out — not an unexpected defect. “Well,” Sloan said, “this is a lot of books,” and in fact he hoped he could endure the expense. “I could give you more if there were dust jackets. But, still –”
He brought the blue book close. On the front cover, near the spine — a dark rectangle, maybe damp. He pressed a thumb into it, pulled away and met resistance. Pressed thumb and forefinger together once, twice.
He set the book down.
He said, “You stole these from a library.”
“No — no,” the guy said. “They were — in a library — before. Before before.”
“That’s relatively new glue,” Sloan said, pointing. “There was a barcode there.” He eyed the rightmost corner of the counter, the telephone. “I can’t take these.”
The guy did not look up. Had not made eye contact since entering. He set about stowing his books. “Then — I guess — I’ll take these somewhere else.”
“No,” Sloan said. He reached for the phone.
The guy contemplated for a moment. For a moment Sloan was still, three fingers on the plastic handset, wondering if he’d misjudged, if the guy had a weapon after all. He began to withdraw.
The guy turned and ran.
He was halfway to the door when the shotgun pump stopped him.
Every time Sloan looked down that foreshortened barrel he became convinced that it had rusted more since the previous time. But what did it matter? The nice thing about a shotgun was that it could do enough from five paces mostly regardless of its general state of repair.
The guy turned, slowly. He held the denim sack to his chest. Now he made eye contact with Sloan, or with the cycloptic weapon; it didn’t seem to matter. He said, “Fucking — readers. Goddamn fucking readers.”
by submission | Jun 23, 2011 | Story
Author : K. Clarke
One could’ve happened by accident. When the first one appeared, I was eating cereal. His machine had plowed across half the basement and stopped against the wall, nested in the remains of the treadmill and the dryer and most of the plumbing. It looked like a submarine and it was way too big to have gotten in by the door, even in parts. Standing in the middle of the floor, the pile of twisted metal behind him and me at the top of the stairs in boxers and wrinkled socks, pointing a milky spoon at him –I guess in that situation it’s hard to come up with a good lie, and he just admitted he was a time traveler. His name is Tim.
Two could have been random chance. Harrelson arrived two days later, in the backyard. His machine was more advanced and a bit smaller, and only took out a ten foot gouge out of my lawn.
Even three might have been coincidence. Or, actually, four. Sonya and Peter showed up in the living room with a handheld machine and didn’t destroy anything at all. They were wearing matching silver jumpsuits though.
The next day it was Gehris, then Jacob, and Terry the day after that. And Kevin and Dr. Morris and the one whose name I forgot, and Dewey and another Peter and all the ones that came after I stopped even asking their names. They must have some special way of recognizing their own kind, because they go out and bring back even more time travelers. I can’t have friends over anymore because of all the future people camped out in my house. There’s one upstairs who says his name is AoooOooOOooooOoo who won’t even get out of the bathtub. They laugh at how primitive the widescreen I just spent $700 on is and give huge complicated explanations I can’t understand when I ask them questions, and I know they’re doing it on purpose because they talk with a lot smaller words when they think I’m not around.
Well maybe I’m not a genius time-travelling scientist, but I’m not an idiot. Tim says my house is a lab when he’s from, and Dr. Morris told me there’s a power plant next door all convenient for him. Jacob has a factory in his time. AoooOooOOooooOoo says the house built here in 500 years is a very nice shade of green. Probably they’re all telling the truth. There’s a lot of time in the future for stuff to happen in, and I’m not surprised if some of it happens here. But one month is not a lot of time for fifty time travelers to all end up in. Even if none of them will own up to it, they know something.
They all came to now for a reason. Something’s about to happen. Something big.
